


These Things Between Us

by AcrylicMist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Blood and Gore, Character Death, Cults, Explicit Language, Humanstuck, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Sexual Content, Zombies, Zombiestuck, davekat - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-12 04:00:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 15
Words: 40,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9054511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AcrylicMist/pseuds/AcrylicMist
Summary: Its been over a year since the virus hit and world fell to shit and Dave Strider wants something more than the slice of peace he and his family have managed to salvage from the rot and ash that remain. When the chance to meet a new group of survivors appears, will the universe grant him one good thing that isn't total bullshit or is this all nothing more than a trap? How can relationships matter when there's nothing left to fight for?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas everybody! I hope everyone is having a fantastic holiday season. I started writing this about two weeks ago in order to have it ready by today so here it is- a new chapter one!

These Things between Us

Chapter One:

Their journey was a strange one in this day and age. The Wal-Mart was only across the parking lot, but in order to get to it we needed to pass through the gate, through the kill-lot, under the watchtower, and through the car barrier to gain access to the empty, weed-filled parking lot beyond.

Or, the mostly empty weed filled parking lot. Weeds were not the only things pushing up past the broken pavement. Several shuffling undead crowded about the place, drawn there by the scent of humanity and trapped by the fences and cars and walls. There weren’t many of them, but they were still dangerous. Still a threat. Weeds and shallow pools of oily black water and the still-walking corpses of rotting bodies filled the parking lot, but only the lot. inside the barriers, there were no undead.

These four separate layers of defense were my idea, to provide a measure of safety to the building we currently resided in. None of the waiting zombies could get in. Turns out I had a knack for organizing survival means and building thrown together walls the end of the world. Good to know. I’d add Zombie Apocalypse Survival Expert to my resume if there was anyone alive who still gave a shit about things like that.

I stood at the reinforced double doors of the Sam’s Club, surrounded by armor of chain link and cattle wire, watching with trepidation as Rose, Roxy, and Dirk crept carefully outside the Wal-Mart three hundred yards away. At this distance they were just smears of movement. Seen like this, they could have been zombies themselves. 

I wished them well.

To get out of the Club from this side was easy, to get in was another matter entirely. I’d made sure of it.

Past the safety of the kill-lot and car barrier was the ugly ruin of the parking lot, now between my family and the safety of the Club. They had to get past all my defenses to get home safe.

First, the cars had been abandoned in the lot when the virus hit, and we’d smashed windows and rolled them into place to form a wall three cars deep. I’d taken loose boards and chains and ripped tires and wove them through that shit to form a mess of metal no zombie had a hope of getting through.

Then, a square area outside of the building about twenty yards wide was heavily fenced in with wire and wooden crates, covering both entrances and connecting them with a short covered tunnel. The watchtower, a glorified light pole with a double wide deer stand roped on with an umbrella for a roof, gave a nice vantage point. The kill-lot, the space was called. Anything not human that got inside was killed with no questions asked.

From the roof itself, there was always Jake and Jade with hunting rifles if something went wrong.

The Sam’s Club was well-defended. We all had made sure of it.

Across the huge concrete lot I could see the Wal-Mart and shadows of burnt out cars and charred spots on the pavement. In some places the ground was warped and burnt straight down to the soil beneath. I watched as the three of them headed the rest of the way out and across the lot, all armed and dangerous. All good people.

When they safely made it inside the other building, I went back inside. Rose, Roxy, and Dirk would be back when they’d finished hunting for new supplies in the superstore. Until then, there was always something new for me to do.

“Dave,” Jane approached me, the front of her gray dress covered in dirt and dust. “We’ve finished pulling out the ventilation system.” John stood to the side, coated in dust and swinging a hammer with his hair in his eyes.

“Good.” I said, taking the clipboard from my hip and walking with them. We passed the space were cash registers once stood, and the fenced in area where chickens now scratched from among the tires and boards. I had seen to it that everything was used to its maximum advantage. The flooring space for the books, technologies, and clothing had been cleared. I kept the jewelry in a box in case it was ever worth something again, and I’d thrown out the phones and everything else that became useless when the bombs began to fall.

“Did they make it across safely?” John asked, wiping dust from off of his glasses with the edge of his shirt.

“Did you expect them not to?” I replied, the tiled floor changing under my feet as we walked into the department where clothes and racks of shoes once stood.

The area now had boxes filled with plants and herbs, potatoes and tomatoes and peppermint, all growing from the light of the skylights far above. Mirrors were hung around the small openings, doubling the sunlight and angling it downwards in a stroke of brilliance on my part.

The far wall held all of the hundreds of pounds of dry goods and foods with a shelf life. By now, it had been nearly a year in and the dent we had managed to make in it was far better than I’d hoped for. It was barely noticeable, more than enough to make it through the winter and well into next year. Maybe even two, if we had a good harvest.

The other wall was where the metal shelving had been converted into small rooms, suitable for one or two people at most, stacked up on each other like bunk beds six pods high. Curtains and blankets and fabrics separated these from the public. This was where we lived.

Here at the end of the world in a Sam’s Club refitted for the apocalypse.

There was only eight of us here, and we all knew each other from school and such. Rose and Roxy and Dirk were all my cousins, John and Jade were both neighbors from down the street, and Jake came with Dirk when shit really hit the fan.

Jane and John took me to where they’d been pulling the vents down from the ceiling. Filters coated in grime and insulation tissues littered the floor beside the shiny thin plastic covering and scrap metal.  
“Perfect.” I flashed them both a smile. “Just what we needed, a load of junk on the floor and twenty pounds of dirt in the air.”

Jane swatted at me. “This was your idea.” She reminded me as I easily swung out of her reach.

“And I swear it’s going to be a good one.” I said, surveying the mess. “Now let’s get to work.”

I ordered shades made for the now-exposed vents from the outside to keep out the rain, which meant a lot of dragging around the wobbly ladder and scrambling up it to latch the covers into place. 

I hoped the change would make the air less stagnant and more breathable when winter came. The scrap metal left over would be bent into bowls and planted with trees up on the roof with the blueberries and the grapes. It had been dry lately, but we still had enough water for gardening. Rainwater would run off of the roof and into vats through the carefully laid out pipes, held in place with electrical wires as rope. The entire irrigation system had been brought to life by Rose, with the help of a single book she had on farming practices.

Jane and Jade were in charge of all the plants. With their help, both the inside and outside of the Sam’s was extremely green.

We were nearly done with the vents, there were only a few left at the back we needed to get to.

At the back of the building, the former loading area was just as heavily reinforced as what was out front, maybe more so, because there was no entry or exit back here. The wall was made out of the wooden slats from inside, with sheet metal laid over them. The concrete here had been broken up with sledgehammers over long hours and carried to the other side to form a rocky ridge, and the dirt square that remained was the home of several working dogs and three goats, only one of which gave milk, the bitch. Not that I even liked milk, much less warm goat udder secretions. Shit like that was just nasty, no matter how thirsty I was or how much Rose nagged about proper calcium intake.

When the three of us had finished with the vents, the ceiling looked strange. It was funny seeing it without all of the silver tubes like worms snaking all over the place up there. Without the iconic vents in place, the Club lost a bit more of its department store feel. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

With a sigh, I went back upfront to wait outside. Rose and the others should be back soon, but I was tired of waiting.

In the beginning, when I still had the store to myself with only Rose, Roxy, Dirk and Jake, the perishable food was our biggest problem. There had been several zombies inside, but we took care of them quickly. We locked ourselves inside and chained the doors shut, tore the store apart, and cannibalized the outdoor fire pits and burned any book with multiple copies to smoke as much meat as we could save round the clock until it spoiled. What fruit we could dry we did. We ate bread for days, nothing but bread and milk and apple juice and cake, anything that would go bad.

It was like when you were little and dreamed about having a store like this entirely to yourself, but not a dream at all and there was blood and tears and rotting bodies in the corners that we didn’t know what to do with as we ate stale chocolate and tried not to feel afraid of the dark. Good times.

Back then, we still had a lot of growing up to do.

We managed to save some, but not most of the fresh food. Even with all the storable goods we had the loss was still a big blow. We were still growing pineapples off of the original ones, those did well inside Jane’s green room. 

Even with all the unused space we still had inside, I wanted more. More room for growing food, and more room for chickens. Maybe even a hog. More room for people in general. Eight teens was not enough to fill the massive store, and we had more than enough food and space for more. We could take in a hundred more people before living space or food became a problem. Rose had done the math. We were growing enough to have eggs every day, meat twice a week, and changeable goods like cheese crackers and Gatorade as we finished off shelves in the back. This week it was some odder foods like pickled veggies and salsa chips, but hey, hunger wasn’t picky. The few cornstalks from the roof would be finished within the month. I hoped the three goats liked cornstalks, because those fuckers were about to be swimming in them.  
Hopefully with time, we could expand and grow with both people and space into the opposite Wal-Mart. That was my plan. We’d already been long cannibalizing it for food and guns and ammo and potting soil and garden seeds, we might as well claim the building itself too. We’d taken the water first, before we had our irrigation system in place and clean water was non-existent. Even now we were rigging the Wal-Mart to catch rainwater and hold it for us in case we ever needed it.

The problem with this picture of mine was that ever since the fires stopped burning in the distance and everything electrical went dark after the virus hit, we had encountered not a single survivor. Not even a hint of one. Jane was the last new person we found, over a year ago and when phones would still turn on if charged.

I watched the front of the Wal-Mart again, debating if climbing up the watchtower would be worth the effort.

I saw them the instant they dashed out of the gutted Wal-Mart and across the parking lot, backpacks bulging and flopping as they ran. Dirk cut several zombies down on the way over, and I ran out and drug back the fence to let them in, drawing my own sword as I did so. Several undead were clustered around the gate, and I needed them gone.

Up close, the zombie was a putrid thing, its facial features melted off under the brutal summer sun long ago. It was easy to forget the thing I ran my sword through had once been a person, especially once its head bounced off the pavement with a splatter. It wasn’t even hard.

Roxy was the last one through the gate, and she helped me lock it back into place. There was black gore spotted down the front of her jacket and dust in her hair.

“Run into any problems?” I asked, wiping off my blade before I put it away again.

“Not quite.” Rose answered. “I’d say we ran into the opposite of a problem.”

“Did you find enough medicine or not?” I asked exasperatedly, hiding my relief at having them back inside the safety of the kill-lot and in one piece.

Roxy and Dirk both unzipped their bags a little. I could see the boxes crammed inside from here.

“We took everything from fever pills to pain packs.” Dirk said, the two crossed katanas on his back flashing in the pale sunlight.

“And we even got several types of vitamins and nutritional supplements.” Rose said smugly.

“I got some sweet bandages and suture tools. Hard core med stuff.” Roxy took a bow dramatically, “But that’s not all I found.”

“Care to fill me in cuz?” I said, dropping an arm over her shoulder. She promptly shoved me off with a small shriek. “Dave no, you’re covered in dust.”

I shrugged. “I’ve been putting my ventilation idea into practice.” I said seriously. “There’s a good three years’ worth of grime up there. I’ve probably just given myself lung cancer or something.”

She shrugged, wiping the dust off of her shoulder, like it mattered much. The jacked was already stained past all hope.

“Anyway,” She went on excitedly, her eyes glinting excitedly, “I found…. This!”

She pulled a flyer from her pocket and handed it to me. I could tell from Rose’s tense expression that something was going on. Dirk drifted closer, wanting a view.

The pink paper in my hand was crumpled and folded, and when I unfolded it I saw an announcement of a tent revival for some church. I stared at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, the letters faded and rain stained, then my eyes caught a strange shadow on the paper and I turned it over.

There, on the back, painted in dripping gray blocky letters, was a message.

“IS ANYONE STILL OUT THERE?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh no, here comes the obligatory filler chapter.

Chapter Two

I gave myself until nightfall to decide what to do. By then everyone knew about the note and what it might mean. They had all gathered in the central meeting area, talking and passing that flyer around like a love note in class when the teacher’s back was turned. All eyes turned to me as I finally left my cubicle and made my way across the floor to the central meeting place.

Excited chatter eagerly sought to drag me in.

“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to remain cool and collected, “First off, before we do anything stupid like begin to hope or some shit, when was the last time that we checked the front of the Wal-Mart? How old is the note?” 

“It must be less than a week old,” Rose said smugly, “Otherwise the words would be smeared from the rain.”

“So there are survivors out there!” John said, literally bouncing in his shoes from excitement.

“Can’t be sure.” Dirk frowned. “A week is a long time.”

“But,” Roxy said, leaning in and throwing an arm around me, “If there’s a chance, we can’t just ignore it?” I slipped free of her hold uncomfortably and shrugged.

“I agree with Roxy,” Jake said, his slightly crisp accent painfully full of hope, “If there’s even a little chance that there are others out there, we can’t let that slip away.”

“We also can’t overlook the fact that these people might be crazy psychos that will kill us and take this place for themselves.” I said, running a hand through my hair in frustration. “We don’t know these people. We don’t know how many there are of where they are or if we can trust them.”

Jade spoke up. “We won’t know unless we try to find them.”

I sighed. “I know, I just wanted everyone to remember the risks.” I said. “Rose?”

“The longer that we spend debating, the further away this other group or person can get.” She spread out her hands, unfolding a gridded map of the area. “If we believe that they are still in the area, and I believe that that is the case, otherwise why leave a note like this?” she said, handing the pink slip of paper to Roxy to hold while she drew a finger along the map she held. “Since the person who left this didn’t notice us, they must have kept to the front of the building. I’ve heard from the group that went earlier that the medicines were still untouched, so that means they didn’t even try and scavenge from inside. I think this means that there are several other notes like this one, probably left in other likely locations for survivors to visit in hopes of contacting someone.”

“I’ll admit, that seems logical,” I said, “But this is the apocalypse so logic’s taking a long vacation. Let’s say that here is another group out there, and that we find them and think that they won’t kill us all in our sleep. That might mean bringing them here and having them join us. Is everyone alright with that?”

“It’s just been us eight for so long.” John said quietly. “I hope that we do find them, even though the idea scares me.”

“We can keep a lot more people in here than just us.” Roxy said, “That’s all you complain about Dave, wanting more people.”

“Which means more mouths to feed and illness to get spread around in winter.” Dirk said darkly.

“I don’t think we should be rash about this,” for the first time, Jane butted in strongly, her hands on her hips. “We need to think clearly. Yes, there are risks, but I think that we can’t ignore these people. Now that we have a stable home and food supply, isn’t it our job to help others?” she said. “I know I was the only outsider here in the beginning, but it’s been over a year now and sometimes I still think about others that might be out there. I might have become one of them if I hadn’t stumbled into you guys so soon.”

“Thank you Jane.” I said, “That being said, time to vote.” Even after the collapse of society, democracy still shone.

In the end, it wasn’t even difficult. Every one of us, myself included, raised a hand in favor of finding the author of the flyer.

We were going to do this.  
…

 

The next day, after taking care of the daily chores here, we spread out. A city-wide search party was formed out of me, Dirk, Jade, and Jake. We were the best fighters and could move the fastest and safest through the zombie infested streets, so it was an easy choice. The other four stayed at the Club. I wished I could keep them updated on our progress so far. God, I missed cellphones.

We started at the front of the Wal-Mart and went from there. Up the street, deeper into the city’s tangled and clogged streets.

None of us had been this far out in months. It was amazing how fast nature reclaimed the urban cityscape. There were deer that skittered away as we turned cautious corners and somewhere a raven was croaking in its coarse voice. Dead leaves turned over with the breeze and made me flinch with the sudden movement of them. The streets were mostly clear of bodies, only a few dried skeletons cracking apart in the gutters with the rats.

We checked for recent signs of human passing, any hint that someone had been this way. Jake was our tracker, and he was good at it, but even he couldn’t find anything and we were left wandering about randomly hoping to blunder across something other than a horde of the undead. 

“Well golly guys, I can’t seem to make anything out.” Jake whispered, squinting at the ground.

“Not your fault,” I whispered back, “Too many leaves and trash and animals nearby to hold tracks for long.”

Somewhere to our left a dog started barking, a growling sound that made us run for high ground. The shadow of the water tower groaned overhead, us hiding in its bleary shade. There was a chill in the air, the hint of cold weather to come.

“What do you think made the dog bark like that?” Jade asked softly, voice lowered in caution.

“I thought you were the dog expert Harley,” I whispered back, shrugging. My spine tingled with tension, something moving through the air around us.

“You get the feeling something’s watching us?” Dirk asked quietly, picking up on the feeling of eyes across my exposed skin. My eyes took to the roofs around us, seeking out a shadow that was not a shadow. The sun was glaring enough that even with my shades I was squinting. Absolutely nothing. 

“What’dya mean?” Jake asked.

“Something’s not right here.” I said decisively, eyes still roaming the skyline. Overhead, metal groaned as the tower swayed with the breeze and my teeth slammed together.

“Let’s move.” Jade whispered. “I’m not liking the feel of this.”

There, in the distance, the sound of clanging, shuffling feet. The drag of limp flesh across the broken pavement, groans.

“Let’s go!” I said sharply. Jake drew his pistols in precaution. We all knew that sound and what it meant and no one wanted to fight through a horde. We retreated to a department store across the street, broke our way inside and up to the roof. The inside of the store was wrecked. With the front windows gone the elements and wildlife had ravaged it, but the roof was clear except for a cloud of pigeons that exploded upward at our arrival. 

I walked over to the edge and peered over to the ground below. We were only a single story up, but the vantage was still better that at ground level. Dirk pulled the map of the city from his bag and we clustered closer.

He tapped at his teeth with the marker, drawing a finger down the crumpled page.

“We’re in the middle of the city now,” He said, “Rose and Roxy think there should be more signs nearby, probably at other locations survivors might flock to.”

“The police station?” Jake guessed, seeing where the girls had circled likely targets on the map.

“And the hospital too.” Jade said.

“Which is closer?” I asked.

“Police station.” Dirk grunted, folding the map again and stashing it away. 

I could see the building at the end of the block, police barricades still in place. I leaned against the low barrier of the roof, feeling the wind in my face and the ground spin below, heart pounding.

A single zombie shuffled along below, ambling haphazardly up the sidewalk, feet dragging through the dead leaves. Dirk leaned over and watched it beside me. It swayed into a trashcan, nearly fell over, and righted itself again.

“Jade, rock me.” I said, holding out a hand to her. She handed me one of the melon sized chunks of concrete that littered the roof and I hefted the stone, judging if the weight would be enough.

I whistled to the zombie, holding the rough rock out over the empty space on the roof, and its face turned upward at the noise just in time for the rock to smack down. The zombie collapsed, legs going limp as its brain was crushed, rotten skull giving easily beneath the blow. Disgusting. My lips twisted into a grimace.

“Nice one Dave.” Jake congratulated softly. I waited for the noise of the rock bouncing across the pavement to draw in others, but nothing came.

We carefully circled the roof, and when the place was clear we quickly moved out.

The old police station was obviously abandoned, the front door swinging open behind the orange barriers. We didn’t go inside, but there was a pink flyer taped to the window.

Jade snatched it down, revealing the exact same lettering and message as before.

“Remind me to thank Rose when we get back.” I said. Jade turned the flyer over, and gasped as a new message appeared. There were words inscribed on the back, the name of a place.

Council Square

That was all there was. Just the words “Council Square” in the same blocky gray text as before.

“That,” I said, “Is so obviously a bad idea. That thing had trap written all over it in neon letters brighter than an advertising dollhouse.”

Jade frowned at me, rustling the flyer.

“What should we do?” Jake asked. “They must want us to find them if they’re leaving dandy instructions like this.”

“We can’t exactly waltz into this place,” Dirk said. “We’ll get our heads ripped off.”

My mind was racing.

“But we can’t ignore the message either,” I said, “That’s the whole reason we’re out here, to find them.”

“So we should be glad they made it easier on us.” Jade said slowly, folding the flyer into a tight square. “It’s better that us wandering around hoping for the best.”

“Exactly,” I nodded to her, “We can at least check the place out.”

Dirk brought out his map again, his brow tight. “Council square isn’t that far away.”

“Perfect,” I said brightly, “Guns up and at the ready folks. Let’s go meet the new neighbors!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter we get the ball rolling. Now I'm getting exited!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's chapter three!

Chapter three.

The four of us continued to creep up the city streets until the square was just ahead, then we pulled over into a nearby building and made for the roof. I wasn’t going to be stupid about this. There was too much on the line.

Silently, we spread across the roof. Jade had her rifle out and peeked the scope over the edge. Jake followed suit with a pair of binoculars. 

“See anything?” I asked, staying low and out of sigh with Dirk.

“By God, there’s actually some bloke down there!” Jake whispered excitedly.

“He’s right,” Jade whispered tightly, and I heard her click off the safety on her rifle.

“Easy there,” I cautioned, “We can’t act rash about this, let me see.”

Jade kept her scope on the stranger below while Jake passed me the binoculars. I had to lift my shades to view below properly and it took a second for my light sensitive eyes to adjust. 

There, sitting in the open on a bench next to the cracked statue of a man on a horse, was a guy. As in, not a zombie. Holy fucking shit. I blinked, but the specter didn’t vanish into the sunlight. They were wearing a hoodie and I couldn’t make out what they looked like, but there was a small white flag fluttering over their head in the breeze. I swallowed thickly.

Dirk wordlessly took the binoculars from me and checked for himself, then turned to me with a tight mouth.

“What’s the plan?”

“The banner,” I said, “They’re expecting visitors.”

“And?” Jade asked.

“I’m ordering everybody to stay here.” I said, not blinking. My shades were still clenched in my fist at my side and I silently met their eyes.

“And you?” Dirk knew me too well. Uncovered, my eyes always showed too much.

“I’m going down to meet them.” I said, “If anything goes wrong, get out. Head back to the Club and forget about the flyers.”

“Dave!” Jade sounded shocked.

“What do you think’s going to happen if I go down there?” I challenged. “There’s only three ways for this to go down. One of those ways,” I gestured down at where the person sat oblivious to us, “Ends with me dead with a bullet through my skull.”

“So then we attack.” Jake said, shrugging, his pistols out and ready. “We can’t have hostile humans so close to us.” I didn’t exactly disagree with that point, but I had a thousand reasons why that couldn’t happen.

“Nope,” I said. “Wrong again, because we don’t know how many of them there are. If I’m killed, get back to the Club. I’m not risking anyone’s life here but my own.”

“We have a standing agreement to never leave anyone behind,” Jade reminded me gently.

“You can’t leave me behind if I’m already dead.” I said, face blank and even.

Dirk nodded. “I’ll get us away.”

“Thanks,” I said, reaching out a fist. Our knuckles came together. It was not a goodbye. I never said goodbye. Couldn’t stand the taste of the words.

“You better fucking make sure of that.” I said, rising up. Brushed the dust off my palms. Ran a hand through my hair. 

Jade’s eyes were tight, Jake’s expression frozen and uncertain. Dirk was solid, shoulders every bit as tense as mine.

I took a deep breath and settled my shades back over my eyes. “Let’s fucking do this.”

…

 

I was alone. The streets were colder without my team behind me, my footfalls louder. I felt comforted by the knowledge of Jade’s sights set on me, watching over from the roof and ready to act. 

My throat was tight, a painful knot there when I swallowed. I really had no plan besides walking into the square with my hands at my sides, and the first few steps I took out into the open space made my skin crawl, expecting a hail of gunfire to find me.

My sword was at my hip, a hand close enough to be ready when needed. The mystery figure reacted when they caught sight of me, but made no further move. My steps didn’t falter as I strode closer, excitement and curiosity mingling. Danger crackled through the air between us.

I was close enough now to see the dead zombie crumpled at their side, see the hand folded across a covered knee, holding a strange weapon with a curved blade.

“That’s close enough.” They said in a roughened scratchy voice. “Hands where I can see them.”

I slowly raised my empty hands. “I don’t want any trouble,” I said, “I saw the flyers.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, and I took in his appearance. Dark skin, faded dreads just falling in his eyes, lush lips and eyes red as blood. A twist to his mouth that made him look pissed.

“The fuck are you?” he asked, standing up from the bench. He was a whole head shorter than me, and standing I could see he was carrying twin sickles along with a hand gun at his side. He looked to be my age, and I wondered how this conversation might have gone if there weren’t so many guns between us.

“Name’s Dave.” I said. “Fellow apocalypse survivor.”

“Well Dave, I want you to stay right where you fucking are. If you make a move, you’ll be blown away.”

His tone was certain, red eyes steady. It was a familiar look, the same I saw in the mirror every day. Up close, his face was gaunt and exhausted still, but clean and his eyes were bright. He had ragged hair the color of earth stained with clay, the color faded out of his dreads. His lips were black.

“How many snipers?” I asked calmly, heart pounding. My mouth was dry.

“None of your business.” He snarled.

“Well then,” I said, “I’m just going to warn you right here and now that I am not a fucking idiot. You really think I walked in here alone, with no backup?”

My eyes, hidden behind my shades, scanned the rooftops across the square. I may have caught a hint of movement out of one of the windows of a firehouse, a flash of metal. Shit. 

He huffed. “Good to know.” He sat back down, eyes glued to a spot over my shoulder, and I thought he might have spotted Jade.

“So,” I said, “Have we moved passed threatening each other? Proved that we both have numbers and firepower and common sense on our side?”

“Maybe,” the stranger said. “Not sure yet.”

“You’re the one who left the flyers.” I said, “And the white flag you’ve got. You must have been prepared for someone to find them, to come and find you.”

“It was a wildshot,” he said, “I never expected it to fucking work.”

“Well it did, so you’d better start talking.” I said. “Is this a truce or what?”

The guy’s face hardened. “Yeah, it’s a truce.” He said. “How many of you are there?”

“Can’t tell you that.” I said.

“I want to speak with your leader.” He said, sickles flashing in the light. He spoke with his hands, and the blades were moving around a lot. It made me nervous, the easy way his arms moved with the strange weapons, the way my eyes followed the movements. Focus Strider. 

“You are.” I said.

“Not you.” He said angrily, “Not the leader of some small search party. I want to talk with your real leader.”

I tried not to be insulted. “You are.” I repeated.

“Holy shit, really?” he said, “No fucking way.” He tightened his grip on the sickles, knuckles paling. 

“You never introduced yourself.” I said, the corner of my mouth twitching upwards. “And why are you acting surprised? Would anyone else risk something this stupid?”

He didn’t smile. “I guess you’re right about that.” He said, relaxing slightly. “I’m Karkat, and I’m also a leader.”

“Good, now we can cut the bullshit.” I said. “Why did you leave the flyers? You’re either stupid or desperate to pull a stunt move like that, and you don’t look stupid to me. What’s up?”

And he didn’t look stupid. There was a hard, roughened way his face was put together, like it had been softer once, had some flesh to smoothen out the curves of his cheekbones that hardship had caved out.

And those eyes. I couldn’t look away.

He grimaced, shaking hair out of his face. “We were hoping others would see them,” he said, “We got separated from some of our group members a while back. We hoped the flyers would help them find us.”

“I’ve got some news for you,” I said, “We’re the only ones in this city. We haven’t noticed any groups coming through but yours.”

“It was a longshot.” He said, raising a weapon to bite at his thumb. “We all know they’re probably dead by now.”

I paused. “Sorry to hear that,” I said sincerely, “We’ve been looking for survivors for quite some time. Yours is the first group we’ve seen in over a year.”

His eyes flashed back to mine. “Is that so?”

“Yeah,” I said, “The whole world’s gone to shit. Honestly I expected there to be more survivors out there kicking, but everything’s gone quiet. It’s only been us and the dead for a long time.”

“Dead like this?” he jerked a hand down to the fallen zombie at his side, the black puddle pooling under what was once a human face.

“I like them dead like that,” I said, “But most of the time they’re up and walking about. Rip your fucking head off if you’re not quick enough.”

“It’s the same everywhere,” Karkat said, kicking at the scuffed pavement. “Nothing but ash and corpses and silence. Its bullshit if you ask me.”

It was wonderful to talk to someone from outside the city. He was the first person other than one of us eight that I’d seen in over a year. It felt so good to just talk like this.

“You and your group travel a lot?” I asked, curious. “What brings you here?”

“Headed south.” He said, cautiously, like he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to admit it. “Seems like a good idea to avoid the clusterfuck the cold is going to bring.”

“Sounds smart.”

“You?” he asked.

I swallowed thickly. I could feel sweat beading on my lip. This might be my chance.

“We’re staying right here.” I said. “We’re more than ready for the cold to come.”

He stayed silent, hearing the shift in my tone. His eyes were on Jade again, I was sure of it.

“You might be a little late there.” I said. “It’s a long way to go if you want to escape the snow and it’s already late November.”

“There were a few holdups.” He swallowed. I watched his adam’s apple bob with the movement and wondered how many people he’d lost.

“How many of you are there?” I asked quietly.

His eyes flashed dangerously. “Enough to defend ourselves.” He snapped.

“Take it easy,” I said, “We have a truce, remember?” I said, like I was sure we each wouldn’t break it in an instant if things went to hell in a handbasket. 

“Why would you ask that?” he demanded.

“This is where it’s going to get a little weird.” I cautioned, “But it’s a pretty valid question. You see, I’m trying to know whether or not you and your people are trustworthy or not.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m about to ask what is possibly the single most moronic question ever asked during this entire goddamn apocalypse.” I said sternly, “Because, I have a lot of room and food and spare space for survivors, and winter is coming, and it looks like you’ve been through some hard times and need a hand.”

Karkat’s mouth fell open, then he snarled.

“What the fuck?!”

“I’m being one hundred percent serious.” I said. “I’m not shitting you or fucking around here.”

“This is a joke.” Karkat said angrily. “A goddamn fucking joke. You, Dave-what’s-his-shitty-face, are a goddamned fucking joke.”

“Thanks,” I smiled brightly at him. “It’s been a while since I’ve heard some new insults. They grow stale after a few months.”

“You,” he seemed to choke on his rage. I backed off a little, not wanting to fuck this up.

Karkat took a few deep breaths, centered himself, decided not to kill me I guess.

“You’re going to need to back the fuck up.” He said seriously, “And fucking explain yourself, right the fuck now.” He didn’t need to voice the threat we both knew was there.

“Me and my people, we’ve been hunting for survivors for a reason.” I said, “We have a good set up. We’re self-sustaining now and the worst we feel has passed. We understand how to live in this new world. But there’s only so much we can do with our present numbers.”

“You admit you’re hunting for survivors,” he said, “You must understand how that must look to us.”

“I swear we’re not out to get you or anything.” I said, “I’m not sure how to exactly prove that at the moment, but we’re all good people. We just want to help.”

“I’m sure that you just want to help us out of the good of your fucking heart.” Karkat sneered, “We’ve ran into survivors before. Most of them tried to kill us. I’ve lost people like that, so you’d better fucking convince me to let you walk out of here alive.”

“Because there’s no risk to you here.” I said, “We’re not going to force you into anything. If you want to tell me to fuck off and leave, then you can do that. I can be the only face you see, and you can forget this ever happened, or…” I trailed off, “You can let me help you.”

“You smug son of a bitch,” he spat, “We don’t need your help.”

“It’s not fucking charity.” I said, trying to make him understand. “I’m just trying to be a decent human being. Just because the world fell straight to hell doesn’t mean I can forget that other people exist.”

“Well whoop de fucking do.” Karkat said, “Congratulations, you’re a decent human being. Want a fucking trophy with that bullshit?” 

“Hey now,” I warned, “It’s not bullshit. And between you and me, just south of here you’ll hit the smoldering mess that’s the carcass of Atlanta. When the wind’s right you can still smell it. Rot and burning.”

“You trying to scare me?”

“I’m trying to warn you,” I said, “You have everything to lose by ignoring me.”

He paced the ground, pulled back those plush lips, bared his teeth. My heart was pounding. I could feel blood in my ears. 

“Fuck you,” he finally said, “And fuck me. You’ve tied my hands here. How do you want to do this?”

A surge of hope skittered through my veins like ice. “Does that mean you’re going to trust me?”

“Fuck no,” he said, nearly snarling. “It means I’m going to slit your throat if you make one wrong move. It means I’m willing to try this out and if I see one thing I don’t like I am going to personally kill you.”

“I can live with that.” I said, restraining my excitement. “Alright then, how many people do you have hidden in that firehouse?” I asked.

“Are we being serious now?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Eleven.” He said after a pause. “There were more once. We’re all that’s left.”

“There’s three on the roof behind me,” I said, “All armed. I can call them down if that makes you feel better.”

“Please do.” He said, “It’s not a nice feeling, having a rifle trained on you.”

“I know the feeling,” I said, nodding my head at the building behind him.

“I’ll call them off if you do.” He offered.

“Deal.” I said. “Your sniper won’t shoot me if I call them down, will they?”

“No, only if you try to kill me.”

“Good,” I said, raising my hand in the air slowly, motioning the three behind me to get their asses down here.

It took a minute before Jade, Jake, and Dirk appeared from around the corner. Their weapons were cautiously away, but I knew how fast that could change.

Jade led the way over to where we stood.

“Karkat,” I said, “Meet Jade, Jake, and my brother Dirk.”

“You’re brother?” he asked, not seeing much resemblance.

“Cousin.” Dirk clarified.

“Close enough.” I said. “I’m pale, I get it. Way to rub it in.”

“At least you can’t get mistaken for a zombie.” Jake said.

“A ghost maybe, but not a zombie.” Dirk butted in.

“Can you give it a rest?” I said, “Knock it off, this is serious.”

“Karkat, was it?” Jade asked politely.

“Yes.”

“What happens now?”

His eyes narrowed again, and he shook his head, sending hair back over his eyes and making him brush it back again. He signed and kicked at the ground.

“Well fuck,” he said, “I guess I’ll invite you in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha yes! Now we can get the ball rolling and launch into this story right and proper. I'll continue to post once a day, but please forgive the late updates like this. My life is kind of a mess right now sorry.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter four.

The firehouse was well-ordered on the inside. All the stairs to the second story were collapsed, only a ladder remained to climb. It was a good defensive idea.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Two weeks.” He said tightly. “Maybe 15 days at most.”

“You work fast.” I noted, passing a boarded up window.

He grunted. “We have to. Helps that the place wasn’t too bad to start with. Only problem was the zombies in the freezer. Looks like a small group locked themselves in for protection. One of them must have been infected by then. Poor motherfuckers.” He said tonelessly. “They’d been like that for a while.”

I could picture the scene all too easily. “We’ve seen a lot of shit like that.” I said. “In the beginning, it was chaos. It’s a miracle anyone made it out.”

“How many do you have back at wherever it is you live?”

“There’s eight of us in total.” I said.

He stopped, a hand on the doorway in front of him, still locked and chained.

“We outnumber you.” He said, his voice strained.

“And I’m confident that I read you right and that we can defend ourselves.” I said. “Besides, you don’t even know where to start looking.”

He huffed out a breath. “I guess you’re right.” he raised his voice. “If any one of you shows a weapon or tries anything, we’ll murder you. Understood?”

“Understood.” I said. Behind me, I could feel Jade, Jake, and Dirk. Feel them breathing. Feel their anticipation and fear. God, I hoped I wasn’t fucking up. My fingers were jittery.

He waited another moment, then unlocked the door.

“Guys,” he warned, not to us, but to those behind the door. “I’m bringing them in. Please act like you have some God given common sense and don’t fucking start anything.”

“What the fuck Karkat?” came the yelled response. “Why the bleeding hell are you bringing strangers here?”

“Chill Terezi, I know what I’m doing.” He yelled back, much too loud for my comfort.

The door flew open, revealing sharp black hair, red-tinted eyeglasses, and a mouth with teeth way too sharp for what could be considered normal. “Hello strangers, could you give us a minute?”

The strange girl didn’t wait for a response, dragging Karkat through the door and slamming it closed again. I could hear them furiously whispering beneath their breath on the other side.

“What the fuck did we get ourselves into?” Dirk whispered to me.

“A shitstorm, I hope.” I whispered back. “Did you expect anything different?”

He kept silent, and the door opened again. Karkat waved us inside, the girl at his side.

Instantly, I was greeted with the barrel of a handgun, a shorter girl an arm’s length away. I raised an eyebrow at her.

“If you try anything,” she warned, the barrel uncomfortably close and steady in her hand.

“Scout’s honor.” I said.

“Nepeta, these are our guests.” Karkat said sternly, “You do not pull a gun on guests without due cause.”

She slowly lowered the gun and shot Karkat a look. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll trust you then.” She said. “Kanaya’s waiting.”

I looked around. The wallpaper was faded, but the room was clean. Terezi was still creeping in the background, a red and white cane across her back.

“Eleven, you said?” I asked.

“All of us are here.” Karkat said. “Somewhere at least.”

A crash rumbled through the floor, followed by someone yelling “Goddammit!” The sound of metal clanking rang out, a rumbling, scraping sound. Karkat winced.

“Forgive us,” he said, shrugging like the sound hadn’t made him nearly crawl out of his skin. “There’s a lot going on right now.”

“I’ll bet.” I said. I could smell smoke, gunpowder, sweat, something chalky that clung in my nose. I tried not to sneeze.

“Okay, brace yourselves,” Karkat warned. “You’re about to be thrown to the wolves.”

A door was closed at the end of the room. We were surrounded by Karkat and his two guards. I wanted nothing more than to rest my hand on the hilt of my sword. Without that option, I set my hands in my pockets. I felt like I was getting ready for a fight, not about to meet a whole new group of people.

The door opened. There was complete silence, but the group of strangers rose as a wave, drawing out an impressive array weapons. I saw guns, blades, even… was that a chainsaw? Holy fucking shit, it was.

“Alright everyone, this is Dave and his team.” Karkat said, his rough voice ringing out clearly. “They have been kind enough to offer us food and shelter, and I want to hold a vote, contingent on me.”

“So not a vote.” Terezi pointed out.

“Exactly,” he said, “But I do want to see what everyone thinks.”

“Well, I’ll raise to the jury our first question,” She said, spinning around and whipping that cane off her back, lowering it at my chest like a sword. “What’s in it for you?”

“Nothing.” I said. This girl was a maniac. “We’re able to help, so why shouldn’t we?”

“Objection,” Terezi said, like this was an honest to God trial, like anyone still gave a shit. “Due to your apparent philanthropy crisis, what makes you think you can help us or that we even need your help?”

The strangers pressed closer. They were all the same age as Karkat, as me. There weren’t eleven of them, but there were enough that if this broke into a fight I wasn’t sure we’d make it out.

“Terezi,” Karkat said, annoyed, that twist back to his mouth. He pulled her aside and whispered something to her. I caught the words “We need this, you know…” and nothing else, but her fierce expression softened and she lowered the cane.

“What does everyone think?” Karkat asked, “Do you want to go with Dave and see what he means?” Decide then? Dave?”

“Of course,” I said automatically. “You’ll be held to no contracts. If you want to go, you can.”

“See, no risk. If they fuck up, we can go.” Karkat said.

“Why are you doing this?” Nepeta asked, facing her leader. “We’ve managed on our own so far.”

“Because we all know we can’t escape the winter. Not like this. We’re not going to make it far enough south.”

Silence followed his words, but no protest. They all knew. I pictured them, this broken assembly of strangers, in this firehouse, fighting away the thought of future cold with no way to escape. Absolute futility. My mouth was dry.

“And we all know about the food problem.” He went on, and I noticed that his wasn’t the only gaunt face in the crowd. “So my stance is, what do we have to lose?”

A girl strode forward, the one with the chainsaw and air of elegance even with her hair out of order and clothes frayed threadbare. “Karkat, are you sure about this?” she asked.

“Absolutely not, but Kanaya, I don’t see any better options willing to randomly fall at our feet like some kind of fucking miracle.” He said. “I’m thinking about us all here.”

“So, we’re leaving? When?”

Karkat turned to me, raising an eyebrow. I cleared my throat.

“As soon as possible.” I said. “No one wants to be out after dark here.”

“That’s not going to work.” Karkat said immediately. “We can’t move out that easily.”

“We’re not that far away from here.” I said, “I don’t see why not. It’s not a long walk.”

“That’s not what I mean, it’s-”

“Karkat.” Kanaya warned, “Explaining further is not wise. I don’t trust these people.”

“We don’t have a choice at this point.” He said, growing angry. “You know that.”

She looked away. “If that is what you believe, I will help.” She said, sighing. Dirk and I shared a look. Something was going on here.

“Follow me,” Karkat said, waving us forward. “Everyone else, start packing. We’re moving out soon one way or another.”

They broke up the circle, let us pass. Through the next hall I found the source of the smoke and the banging. A guy was wrestling with a coil of wiring, a blowtorch in hand. It’s flame reflected off what appeared to be a pair of 3-D glasses perched low on his thin nose.

“So these are the visitors,” he said, without looking up. “Vriska told me you let them in.”

“The fuck are you up to now?” Karkat asked, kicking a coil away from his feet and out of the walkway. 

“We’re trying to get this piece of shit electrical system working again.” He said. The guy behind him held a large wrench, a towel across his shoulders. He was a menacing figure, long haired and large.

“Well you can give it a rest. We’re leaving soon.” Karkat said, and the guy reared up and around.

“We are?” he asked, “So soon?”

“Yeah, we are. So get your shit together.”

“Alright KK.” He said, then turned to the other guy, waving a hand. “Tear it all down Equius, we’re moving out.”

Karkat walked on, and I resisted the urge to grab him by the shoulder as ripping metal sounded behind us.

“What’s going on here?” I asked, serious. “What is it you’re not telling us?”

He signed. “There’s a reason we’ve been moving so slow.” He said. “Sollux had bad asthma. His shitty lungs can’t make long journeys without trying to kill him and we ran out of emergency inhalers months ago.”

I blinked. “That can be taken into account easily enough.” I said. “We’ll go slow, take it easy.”

Privately, I thought that Rose had a hold stash of inhalers squirreled away somewhere. I kept the thought to myself. No need to give false hope and the information couldn’t help us here.

“That’s not the problem.” Karkat said, “This is.” He opened the last and final door.

Across the room, three people were packing up rifles. I recognized the row of windows that illuminated the dust in the air and knew that these were the snipers. Two guys, one girl. It was the girl who spoke first, an eyepatch across one eye, the number 8 splashed across the black triangle with a burst of blue. 

“Well look who it is,” she said, smiling in a way that made my skin crawl. Her southern accent made the words falsely sweet. “I’m surprised that you could walk in here. Not many make it out of my crosshairs.”

“Don’t you miss nearly every time at targets?” one of the guys said, hoisting up what must have been the largest gun I’d ever seen in my life. Shit was something like out an action movie. The barrel was longer than Jade’s entire rifle.

“I don’t need targets when I’ve got luck on my side.” She said disdainfully, flipping her hair over her shoulder.

“Vriska, Eridan, this is Dave and his team.” He said, rubbing at his eyes like they bothered him. I wondered how he standed not wearing shades like me. “Tavros, how are you doing?”

The last guy finished packing away his hunting rifle and slung the case across his back. He was fiddling with strange metal bars, leather straps dangling from them.

“I’m doing just fine.” He said, strapping them across his wrists, his elbows. Framing his arms in metal like an exoskeleton. He swung the contraption over and more metal shot out. He set the ends against the floor and swung himself up easily, supporting himself with the arm braces. His legs were twisted, the one that could reach the ground shook and seized when he rested any weight on it.

“Dave,” Karkat said wearily, “Meet Tavros.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright yes I did manage to update before midnight! I'm currently traveling with my family and the only time I can update is when we reach the hotel at night. I havn't finished writing this yet, but I don't expect the traveling to interfere with the daily updates so stay tuned!
> 
> Its time for a cliffhanger!  
> (I bet you probably all know who didn't make it by now)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for pointing out the typos in the previous chapter! I'll try to edit better next time.  
> And yes, sadly Gamzee did not make it. Good job if you figured it out!

Chapter five.

Great. They had someone who couldn’t fucking walk. Just our luck.

I took Karkat aside privately. “This isn’t going to change my offer,” I said, “But I’m really fucking curious here. How the hell did you manage to keep him alive this long?”

Karkat shrugged. “I’ve known him all my life. When the virus hit me and Ga- someone we’ve lost,” he seemed to choke on the name, but went on. “We got him out. Kept him safe. Tavros is perfectly healthy and no one can hold a rifle steadier than him. He’s the best shot we’ve got and a great guy and I’ll be damned if I let anything happen to him.”

“Holy shit dude,” I said, “No wonder you’ve been traveling slow. Okay, that’s okay, we can work with this.” I said, my mind racing.

“He can’t stand like that for long.” Karkat said. “We have a chair for him but it’s pretty much useless outside. Stairs are another problem.”

“Nothing that can’t be solved.” I said. “I’m actually really glad about this. It proves that you’re a good guy Karkat. You have a heart under all that rage somewhere, I just know it.”

There. There it was. The smallest hint of a smile, before he scowled and told me to go fuck myself.

…

 

We did end up staying the night. I hoped Rose, Roxy, Jane, and John didn’t get too worried. They knew this might happen. The four of us slept fitfully in a back room, one keeping watch at all times.

We hadn’t packed much food, but Karkat was kind enough to make sure we were given water. We also were allowed to keep our weapons, which was a surprise. 

“We have to make this work somehow.” Karkat told me. I left my group behind, wanting to talk with the other leader privately.

“I’m glad that you’re trusting us.” I said. “I know not many would.”

He grunted. “I’m not sure I should, but I’m out of options. We’re on track to starve to death or freeze or get eaten.”

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“What is it?”

“With all the places you’ve been and survivors you’ve seen, did you ever run into a guy with a sword? Probably wore a ball cap, and was completely badass. Went by Broderick maybe?”

“No.” he said, after thinking for a moment. “No one like that. Someone you knew?”

“My older brother.” I said. “He was one of those crazy preppers, you know? Had a bunker and everything. We were down here visiting my cousins when it happened, so a fat lot of good it did. He vanished on me that day and I haven’t seen him since. I’m sure he’s dead, but I had to ask.”

“I understand.” Karkat said, but really I knew he didn’t. Not like what he thought he did. My teeth clenched at the thought of Bro, of the endless hours spent on a rooftop in the sun. My scars ached at the memory, and I shoved those memories away. Locked them back the fuck up. Threw away the key. Took a deep breath. 

“I had an older brother too.” Karkat said slowly. “Watched him die. Lost my dad early on.” His voice was still rough, not a catch in it.

I understood the feeling of being so far gone tears weren’t possible. Most people had hit that point by now. I’d hit mine at twelve years old to the sound of a sword fight and screaming.

“That sucks man.” I said, heartbeat faltering, then racing forward, then slowing. Key, I thought. Throw away the key. No time for memories here. “I’m thankful every day I still have my cousins.”

“None of us here are family.” Karkat said, “But most of us know each other from before in some way. We all met at the high school when the bombs began falling and went from there. At one time there were nearly thirty of us.”

I was caught, then, looking at him again. At his eyes and the way his arms moved when he talked, languorous and smooth-muscled. The expressions that crossed his face when he though I wasn’t paying attention. I was glad that my own eyes were still hidden and that the darkness would conceal the blush I could feel spreading across my face. God, he was beautiful.

He looked away, teeth clenched, sickles at his sides. “I do the best I can for my group.” He said, “But sometimes that isn’t enough.”

…

 

They were all packed and ready to go in the morning, bright and early.

“Let’s do this.” I said. Everyone was wearing heavy packs, including me and my team. We were helping out in any way we could. Tavros was carried down the ladder, and was fitfully standing by the door with the help of his braces, the pack across his back smaller than anyone but Sollux’s.

I was still trying to patch names to faces, but it was easier for me than most. I’d always been good with faces.

Aradia was helping Sollux carry a load of electrical shit and wiring I didn’t see the point of carrying. Anything mechanical had gone dark a long time ago, but the tech guy was adamant about it so what the hell?

Everyone needed something to pin their hope on.

I couldn’t stop sneaking glances at the unfamiliar twists to the other boy’s legs, the joint-less curl of one lagging behind like dead flesh. His other, straighter, leg was able to support weight but the knee bent the wrong way and there was a vicious twist to his ankle that made him limp along the side of his foot. It looked painful, but I’d never caught anything but a smile on his face as that leg shook and trembled beneath him.

“Everyone ready?” I asked, stretching out my sore muscles, limbering up. I’d sharpened my sword again last night and was ready to get back to familiar territory. I told myself I was imagining the way Karkat’s eyes followed the movements, lingered on the strip of white skin at my waist my shirt revealed when I bent over, but I caught him swallow as he looked quickly away and felt my ears heat up. Fuck yeah.

Maybe I wasn’t imagining things.

“Yes,” Karkat was beside me, Dirk and Jake at my other shoulder.

“So here’s my plan,” I said, “We go slow and we go silent. If we run into any trouble we take it out with blades. No guns. The noise would only draw in more. Any zombies spotted must be taken out. We can’t have them following behind us like stray dogs.”

“Yeah, we know the drill.” Karkat said, giving his sickles a twirl. “What then?”

“Follow me and my team,” I said, “When we get back to our base we can work things out, but right now I’m just going to focus on getting everyone there safely.”

“Let’s get this shitshow moving then.” Karkat said, waving his group forward.

Equius was carrying Tavros across his back, folded like an injured marine across those broad shoulders. Tavros’s braces were still in place, and he was more than ready to swing out with one if a zombie got too close. I could respect that. It took a strong back to carry another person for that long, but Equius never protested.

It was slow going but no one complained. It went easily enough until we passed the water tower again and a small group of zombies turned in our direction. I had to give it to Karkat and his group- I didn’t even have to draw my sword.

The offending undead were neatly disposed of. There were only eight of them, a number my team alone could have easily handled, but it was the way the situation was handled. Not a word spoken, just a shift of Karkat’s eyes and they were off, weapons ready and efficient. I got the sense they were showing off. Didn’t want to look weak in front of us.

And shit, I hadn’t realized that Terezi’s cane had a sword blade inside. Good to know.

We had to take a lot of breaks, when Sollux’s wheezing got too loud and he started choking, when Equius had to set Tavros down to rest his back. When Feferi tried to pet a stray tabby cat that hissed at her and fled.

It took most of the morning to travel a handful of blocks and cross a few intersections. It was past noon when the front of the Wal-Mart came into view and it was only then I let myself feel a hint of relief. 

“How are you going to do this?” Jade asked, pressing close, her dark hair wild.

“We get them inside the kill-lot, have Rose or someone open the gate, and prepare to get this shit sorted out in an orderly manner.”

“Do you think that will work?” she asked.

“Don’t you?”

“I think it’s a start.” She admitted. “The start of something different and new.”

“That’s all I’m asking for right now,” I said, “Something new and different.”

We wordlessly made it around the Wal-Mart. I don’t think any of them realized how close we were, not until we turned the corner to the back of the building and across the massive empty parking lot the watchtower and the car wall were both visible.

The Sam’s Club was untouched, not burnt to the ground like an irrational part of me had feared.

“Holy shit, is that it?” Karkat asked, squinting into the hazy glare of the pavement.

“Yep.” I said brightly, waving a hand in the air, seeing a blurry figure on the distant roof maybe wave back. “We made it in one piece.”

There were a few zombies gathered around the Club, drawn in by the smell of life and livestock. Maybe a dozen or so, and Dirk gladly mowed his way through them, loping off heads with his katana. Nepeta had one mean swing with a machete. The shorter girl made it look easy and heads were rolling.

“Let’s do this.” I said, leading the way across the lot until the car wall loomed before us, the gate to the kill-lot being drug back by a grinning John and Jane, a smile plastered ear-to-ear across their faces.

“Dave! You made it! And you found them and they’re here and everything’s going to be alright and-”

“Hold on John, breath, let’s get them inside.” I said, and the gate was open, the safety of the kill-lot a certain thing. I could smell the rank scent of the goats from here.

Home. 

Jade finished off the last undead, and helped corral the group inside. Rose was suddenly there, a bright-eyed Roxy at her side, and they locked the gate behind us. The clang of the lock into place made a knot of tension unwind from my shoulders.

Safe. 

Karkat’s eyes were wide, his hands tight on the hilts of his sickles. “What the fuck is this place?” he asked, red eyes watching the barbed wire and chain link and cars, the reinforced doors of the Club solid and sturdy.

“Welcome to the Club.” I said grandly, “Probably the safest place left in the entire state. This is Rose and Roxy, my other cousins, and Jane and John. Everyone, meet Karkat and his group of people whose name’s I’m still learning.”

“You actually found them.” Rose said, eyes containing a twitch of a spark I hadn’t seen in months. “I’ll admit, I’m surprised.”

“Hello everyone! Oh my God you’re all so fuckin’ hot.”

“Thank you, Roxy, for that brilliant observation, care to help get them all inside? There’s eleven.” I said.

Their excitement was contagious, but I could sense the other group’s trepidation and unease. Karkat looked ready for a fight, but Sollux had a hand on his shoulder, lisping in his ear. He broke off whatever he was saying to let out a wracking cough, thin frame rocking with the force, a deep wheeze still rattling around in his chest.

“This doesn’t need to be permanent,” I reminded the other leader, “You’re not agreeing to anything.”

He steeled himself, eyes flashing. “Alright, I’ll see what this is. For tonight at least.”

I gave him a small smile, nothing more than a slight upturn of the mouth. “Thank you.”

He looked away.

Equius let Tavros slip from his back, and the boy landed easily and began walking about eagerly, braces clacking against the ground like crutches. Several people were still holding weapons as if they doubted the safety of the walls around them or didn’t know what else to do with their hands.

My focus sharpened, and my mind settled on the current problems as I reeled it back from expansive ideas of the future. One step at a time, I told myself. Focus on the now. 

“Okay, let’s get everyone inside and out of the sun.” I said, leading the way. I knew the zombies we’d cut down would need to be taken care of soon, but that could wait until later. Right now, I was all business. 

“There really is just eight of you.” Karkat said, unsurprised but with his expression made of sharp angles. He was going to continue, but then we were through the doors and the sight of the chicken pen stopped him, and then I saw actual surprise cross his face.

The high ceilings let in light from above, mirrors reflecting it downward. Everywhere there was green growing things. The central space was clear and open, the weapons wall well-ordered and lethal with everything from assault rifles to golf clubs. The shelves of the far wall were visibly stocked with food up to the rafters and inside the chill was gone from the air.

Behind us, I heard other gasps and exclamations, and a sense of pride filled me. We’d worked hard to achieve this, and it was a pleasure to finally be able to share it with someone. To actually give something back to the world that wasn’t shit.

Something like awe crossed Karkat’s face.

“Wait till you see the roof.” I said, “There’s a whole farm up there. There’s goats out back as well, and a fat lazy dog, but a shit lot of good they do.”

“How did you do this?” he demanded, anger overtaking his shock as he fell back to the one emotion he felt safe showing.

“I guess we got lucky.” I said, “We never ran when the virus first hit. We’ve been here since the beginning, constantly trying to improve and grow and make the Club better. This is over a year’s worth of hard work that’s just starting to pay off.”

There was a squeak. Rose had handed a brown hen to Nepeta to hold, and she was petting the bird happily. The hen I couldn’t say was exactly pleased with this, but she was a good bird and put up with it.

“We have running clean water too.” I said, maybe showing off a little.

“How the fuck did you get chickens?”

“Raided some backyard coops that didn’t get smashed in, brought them here. They stay inside mostly to keep the hawks off, but I’m planning an outside run soon."

“Oh there’s babies!” Feferi had a chick the size of an egg in her hand, peeping sweetly like the fluffy cotton ball it was.

“Don’t turn your back on the rooster,” I warned her, “He’s one mean motherfucker.”

I continued with the tour, showing them the roof and the back pens with the goats and dog and our watering system. The corn was looking nice for so late in the growing season. It was a blessing the cold held off enough for our late start at planting. I even showed them the sleeping pods, dozens of them just waiting for people to move in.

Karkat steered me aside, teeth clenched.

“Why the fuck would you decide to bring us here?” His voice was low and dangerous. “Are you insane?”

“We’ve ran the numbers,” I said, “Again and again. We can support more people here, so why shouldn’t we? We worked our asses off to build this place.”

“Why?” he nearly snarled. “Why risk everything bringing in a bunch of strangers? What if we kill you and take this all for ourselves?”

In a way, his paranoid anger was reassuring. It meant he understood what was going on here.

“Because,” I said, “It’s been a year since the virus hit. Isn’t it time to start looking forward again? To want something other than just plain survival?”

“What’s the catch?”

“If there’s anything that can be considered a catch.” I said seriously, “You stay here, you work just as hard as we do. We keep each other safe and have each other’s backs. You stay here, you become one of us. Not two groups living together, but just us trying to do the best we can.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers, breathing deeply. “We have been shivering underneath overpasses for weeks, eating rats when we’re lucky.” He said, “This can’t be real.”

“It’s real.” I promised. “It’s a way to survive the winter.”

“God.” He said, rubbing at his eyes again. “Jesus.”

“Just call me Dave.” I said, unable to restrain myself.

“Asshole.”

He blinked, taking in the full scope of the Club, at his group mingling with mine effortlessly. Laughter rang out, jokes and insults flying freely.

“Why do you never take off your shades?” he asked suddenly. “Even last night in the dark you kept them on.”

He asked like he already knew the answer, like he needed one last nail in the coffin. It wasn’t that hard to figure out. I’m surprised it took him this long to ask.

“I’m surprised that you don’t wear any.” I said, “I can tell your eyes bother you.”

“It’s nothing I can’t handle.” He said, crossing his arms over his chest. Those red eyes met mine with a challenge. “Leucism, kind of like what you have except it’s only a single pigment missing instead of them all.”

“What gave it away?” I asked. He let out a bark of laughter.

“You look in a mirror recently?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

But there was no bite to the words. Honestly, my head was still swimming with the sound of his harsh laugh, too raw and hoarse but still beautiful. Still meaningful. 

But he was still waiting, needing to see, so slowly I reached up and pulled the shades from off of my face.

Like this, facing him unguarded, meeting his eyes was an intimate thing. More so than a handshake or hug. I felt vulnerable, ready to be judged by him. Offered myself up for this intimate viewing willingly.  
Once, I would never have allowed this to happen. I would have fought hard and spilled blood to prevent it, but seeing the same shade I wore in his eyes made it easier to face him. He of all people must understand what it was like.

“See,” I said, swallowing, “Just like yours.”

He swallowed too, not looking away. His face softened, some weight falling off of his shoulders. We were too close, I could feel the warmth of his body. I wanted to lean into it, lean into those red eyes that matched mine exactly.

“Yeah,” he said, “Just like mine.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that the stage has been set and everyone is in order, let's do this!

Chapter Six:

The next few days were fitful. Cluttered and shaking days, full and vibrant with the peculiar type of madness that accompanied bringing in a group of eleven total strangers. I never wanted this to end. I felt like I could finally breathe.

Everything came in flashes. Karkat settling into the pod across from mine, hanging up black fabric between us, the flash of sickles in the sunlight as he and John sparred in the kill-lot for practice, sickle and hammer combo spawning a plethora of communism jokes.

Karkat helping Sollux set up his tech corner. The guy still trying to build a working radio from scratch. Rose and Kanaya taking over the paperwork, divvying up supplies with elegance and ease and ensuring that no one went hungry. The smoothness of the transition of having nearly twenty people living together, the press and pull of so many new stories and knowledge and quirks and pet peeves and the way Karkat stayed awake at night, pacing the floors restlessly as I listened, restless in my own pod. I was caught in it all.

Tavros with the goats, one nibbling his brown hair up into a mohawk. Vriska, Terezi, and Roxy finishing the irrigation system at the Wal-Mart and insuring our water supply all winter long. The day of the Great Corn Harvest, Karkat putting his sickles to a different use and the feast that came after. Jane with corn silk in her hair, Dirk and Jake sneaking off together into the shadows, fingers linked together. Karkat laughing, really laughing, carefree and light. Smiling. 

Karkat reading on his bed with the curtains drawn back to let in the light, skin the color of good dark earth.

Karkat pacing around, talking and ordering and insulting and caring deeply about everyone he knew, the entire Club falling under his protection.

Karkat, catching me watching him again, meeting those red eyes from across the room with a thrill.

Karkat.

Karkat Karkat Karkat.

Fuck. It had been a week and I was crushing hard. Rose was quick to notice.

“You know,” she told me, a basket of brown and white eggs at her side, “If you were any more obvious there would be little red hearts floating above your head.”

“I’m not being obvious,” I protested, “You’re just freakishly good at reading me, and don’t think I haven’t noticed you and Kanaya spending so much time together either.”

A delicate blush spread across her cheeks, but her eyes remained highly analytical. She snapped me a sharp look.

“From an outsider’s view of the situation, did you know that we original eight were a terrible choice for repopulating society?” she asked. I resisted the urge to cover my ears like a child.

“Oh god you did not just mention repopulation.” I said.

“I’m quite serious,” Rose sounded extremely self-assured. “Out of all of us, we were all either related or gay. Coincidentally, Karkat and his group also has a relatively low amount of couples. I wonder if that’s going to change soon?” She raised an eyebrow at me.

My face was cool and even. I was not flustered, not at all. Striders didn’t get flustered.

“Why don’t you try talking to him instead of staring from across the room all the time?” She asked coolly.

“I do not stare at him across the room all the time,” I protested, “Not like what you’re thinking.”

“Why haven’t you talked to him yet, about your interest? You not the only one with eyes that linger.” Rose said. “He’s been watching you to.”

I knew he was. I’d quickly grow to anticipate the feel of his eyes on me, crackling and electric and far too addictive to be healthy. 

“Because,” I sighed, running a hand through my pale hair, “I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because we just met and we’re both leaders and I don’t want him to think that I’m throwing myself at the first available person out of desperation.” The words poured out of me with a hint of relief. I’d been holding too much in. “And I don’t want this to go wrong and I have a bad habit of fucking up relationships. There’s too much on the line if things go south. I can’t have some failed relationship sitting between us, festering like an open wound and oozing pus and shit over everything we’ve worked for.”

“Ignoring the attraction isn’t going to make it go away.” Rose said softly, laying one slim hand on my arm. “Trust in yourself a little, and trust in him. If the feelings are as mutual as they seem, you’re just going to make each other miserable by pretending the attraction doesn’t exist.”

“I wish it was just attraction,” I groaned, “Then I could make myself not care.”

“Point in case,” Rose said lightly, “You’re already in too deep. Just go talk to him. If it would make you feel better, Kanaya and I could set up a meeting for you two.”

“Oh holy God, Rose.” I said, mortified. “You do not discuss my lack of a sex life with your new girlfriend. Is nothing sacred?”

“We don’t have the luxury of taking our sweet time.” She reminded me. She turned to face the Club. looking out over everything we've made. “It is unwise to dwell within our false sense of security for too long. This sanctuary we’ve made is a fragile one at best.”

My hair was getting longer. I had to stop to brush it back from where it was beginning to fall on the top edge of my shades.

“Why is it,” I said, “Whenever I need someone to set me straight, you magically appear?”

“What are cousins for?” Rose elbowed me, smiling. “Now go get him.”

…

 

It didn’t take long for me to track him down. He was elbow deep in the chicken pen, helping Jane, Aradia, and Feferi rake the droppings into barrels for fertilizer. 

“Mind if I join in?” I asked.

“Grab a broom,” Jane said, waving me over. “The roosts need sweeping.”

The straw broom for the chicken pen was very frayed and worn, but it doubled as a weapon. I had to beat my way past the resident evil guard rooster, Noir. A black bantam maybe six inches tall, he was a tiny feathered bullet of rage. I tried my best to sweep the floor of the pen, but every two seconds this rooster would fly at my face, aiming for the eyes.

“Jane,” I complained, swiping at him with the broom lie a sword, “Why haven’t we eaten this evil thing yet?”

“Genetic diversity.” She answered, wiping a hand along her brow. “We only have two roosters.”

“Fuck genetic diversity.” I said, “Who needs his midget genes anyway?” Personally I though the black bird would look good with a sword shoved right through him. It would certainly be an improvement. 

But I listened to Jane and didn’t knock his feathery ass out with the broom. He’d better know how lucky he was.

It was enjoying to watch Karkat work. He was so absorbed and diligent, his attention to detail spot-on. The work didn’t take long, and when we were finished I decided to put my plan into action.

“Hey Karkat, how about a sparring match? That is, if you’re not too tired out from battling the hens.”

“With you?” he asked, instantly interested.

“The one and only.”

“You’re so fucking on, Stri-douche.”

“How the hell do you know my last name?”

“Roxy.”

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” I said, “What will you be using?”

“My sickles.”

“As long as we don’t cut each other to ribbons we’ll be fine.” I said, leading the way. He already had his weapons with him, as did I. No need to run back to our pods for them.

The day was overcast and bleary. It would probably rain later, but for now the sky was darkened enough that my eyes felt comfortable with the light level. I kept my shades firmly on my face. It would take more than clouds to make me take them off again.

The kill-lot was empty, which was good. I didn’t want an audience for this.

“Are you using that sword?” Karkat asked, eyeing the sheathed blade at my side.

“Yeah,” I said, “It’s been a while since I’ve practiced with it.”

“Any other weapons?”

“No. Let’s try not to kill each other here.”

“Fine,” He said, reaching down and removing a hidden knife from his boot. Then another short blade from his side I hadn’t noticed. Then a heavy revolver from his waist under that black hoodie he always wore. The gun joined the other weapons on the pavement.

I let out a whistle, impressed. “You carry those all the time?”

“Every day.” He said, his brow furrowing. His tone dropped, became something secret. “I don’t feel prepared otherwise.”

There was a pause, a shared heartbeat between us.

“I know the feeling,” I said, stripping myself of a nearly identical setup. Two hidden short blades, a hunting knife, and a blocky black Glock from my waistband went into the pile. “I guess we’re both paranoid, overprotective leaders.”

He let out a huff, twirling a sickle between his fingers, the unfamiliar curves of the metal glinting.

“Are you ready for this?” he asked, the other sickle appearing in hand, both ready and deadly.

I drew my sword slowly, unbuckled the sheath when it was free and let it drop to the ground. I didn’t want anything for Karkat to snatch or grab or trip me up during the fight. I wanted my mind clear.

I checked the balance of the blade, light reflecting off its keen edge. Unlike Dirk’s swords, mine wasn’t a katana. The straight bladed weapon was fashioned after old English styles, the sword of knights. 

I took an even stance and a deep breath. “Are you ready for this?” I shot back.

He laughed, spinning his weapons gleefully. “I’m going to shove that sword so far up your ass it’ll take you a week to shit it out.”

My own face fell into a hard grin. “En guarde, motherfucker.”

Our blades met with a clash, both of us testing the other’s speed and reflexes. I’d seen him spar with John and Jake, knew how fast he could move and his second sense for evasion.

He was fast, but I was fast too. I stopped his swing easily, batted the sickle aside, leaned back to avoid the second one I knew would be cutting for my gut, then swept my blade up and around, aiming for his throat.

He stopped my strike with ease, locking my sword within the curve of a sickle and brought the second one up to match and turned the blade over, trying to force the flat of my blade to turn around and immobilize me. I tore free with the screech of metal, wary of that trick again as I clashed back into the fight.

We matched each other swing for swing, strike for strike. I’d never met an opponent so evenly matched to me before, and the feeling of the strength behind the blows and the speed of the cuts was exhilarating.  
The fight went on, a clash of steel and limbs. It lost its viciousness, lacked a drive to hurt and wound or outdo each other, became a dance where neither of us gave ground. It was a blessing and a fight unlike anything I’d ever experienced. 

Like this, I had every excuse to watch him, watch the lines of his body. Stare deeply into those eyes and the flex and pull of muscle across his shoulders. Those full lips, fallen open in a smile, the white flash of teeth, hair like a mane about his head. Lion-like and beautiful.

And he was watching me right back. I wasn’t sure what I was enjoying more, the friendly strife or the knowledge that Karkat was the one fighting me and that he was enjoying himself just as much. 

I had never fought like this before, with such loose-jointed and ready cheer. I’d restrained myself against sparring with Dirk, not wanting to fight, to hear the ring of steel on steel like this, afraid the sound would bring back memories of other sword fights and a pounding voice yelling “Faster, move faster! You’ll never make it out if you don’t move fast enough.” 

The ringing, stinging flat of a blade slapping me across the face when I hadn’t moved fast enough, blood in the air, on the ground, running across steel and pale skin.

My arm shook, the sudden attack of memory shattering my focus. Karkat mercilessly hooked a leg around mine and sent me spilling onto the rocky ground. I rolled, trying to avoid him, but his foot came down on my blade, a sickle at my neck.

I blinked up at him, but his expression was clouded. He reached down a hand to me, I gritted my teeth and let him help pull me up. The ground spun under me, my head ringing.

“What happened?” he asked quietly. “You lost focus.”

“I,” I started, then broke off. “Shit. It wasn’t anything.”

“You’re touching that scar on your cheek,” he pointed out gently, and I snatched my traitorous hand down and clenched it into a fist. My arm shook again, and I folded it against my side, against my ribs, told myself to forget the phantom pain I felt. It wasn’t real. Under my forearm, my ribs were fine. There wasn’t any blood. It wasn’t real.

“Hey,” Karkat said, “It’s alright, everything’s alright.”

I tried to slow my breathing, the shaking.

“I’m fine,” I gasped out, “It’s fine. It’ll pass. Just give me a second.” I decided to sit back down. I didn’t trust my legs to hold me.

Karkat sank down beside me, looking worried but silent.

Adrenaline slowly died out in my system, the taste of fear diluted on my tongue. I scrambled in my head for whatever leak let out the memory of Bro’s voice, of that day on the roof, and locked it back up again. Threw imaginary chains around that shit, threw it in a closet, imagined it at the bottom of the fucking ocean. As far removed from day-to-day thinking as possible.

I reached for my sword, drug it back to me. Hooked a foot through the sheath and hid the blade again. Karkat silently watched the entire thing, watched me gather up the pieces of myself from off of the pavement and hide them away again.

When I was finished, when I could breathe again, he said “Someone fucked you up, didn’t they?”

“Shut the fuck up.” I spat, this whole thing spinning out of control and out of the direction I’d planned on.

His eyes narrowed dangerously, and I wondered how this conversation would have gone if there wasn’t so much trauma and swords and angry words between us. If I wasn’t so fucked up.

But the snap never came. No rage, no violence, only the feeling of his hand on mine. His fingers were warm and reassuring and cruel because I knew he didn’t mean anything by it. I wanted to snatch my hand away, to curse him again, but his face was right there, right fucking there, and I was feeling dangerous and desperate and reckless and damn it.

Fuck him.

And fuck me.

Fuck it all.

His lips crashed into mine and I promised myself that this time, I wasn’t going to fuck it up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so excited to get into the meat of the story now. I have big plans for this fic.  
> It's been six days and I've been running late on writing new chapters because of travel, but I should be able to put in more time and effort in the next few days. I have everything up to chapter nine written so far, and wow this is gonna be good! I can't wait!
> 
>  
> 
> Things are going to happen...


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey it's my Birthday tomorrow! I'm so happy right now. :)  
> Happy New Year's Eve everybody!!!!!
> 
> Warning! Emotional pain and feels ahead. I don't think it gets too bad in this chapter, but I thought a heads-up was in order.

Chapter seven-

A moment’s pause, his face close to mine, breathing in my air. My lips were cold without his on them, even though the kiss had lasted less than a second.

“Did, did you kiss me just to distract me?” I asked blankly, too full of emotions to show any single one. My voice had never sounded so cold.

“No,” he said, just as cold. I couldn’t read his eyes or his expression. Everything was frozen.

I licked my lips and saw his pupils dilate slightly. “Good,” I said, “Because I’m going to kiss you now.”

And I did. Warm and full, skin on skin contact. Again and again and again, and he let me, kissing back.

Oh God, it was everything like I’d imagined. His mouth was hot and solid on mine, heat exploding to the surface of my skin, trailing lines of fire where his fingers traced over my arms and chased the chill away.  
I pulled him closer, ignoring the chill of the pavement, the painful dig of a rock in my side, the scuffs along my palms where I’d fallen, ignoring everything that wasn’t Karkat.

My hands were at his back, drifting upwards to his face. I pushed my tongue along his bottom lip and heard his breath catch, his hands tangling in my hair and at the back of my neck. I broke free to drag my mouth down the side of his jaw, kissing a line across his face, the hard angle of my shades pressed against his face.

He didn’t complain, one hand splayed against my jaw, cupping my face in his palm. The slight scar across my cheekbone ticked uncomfortably, hypersensitive and off-limits, and shot a sudden bolt of discomfort through me strong enough to separate my mouth from his.

Karkat was breathing heavily, the touch of his hand on me the only thing that beat the hostile memory off. I still pulled my face away, expression unreadable as it always was. It didn’t matter. Karkat still caught the change when his hand brushed against the mark and knew why I’d pulled away.

“You,” he breathed, voice low and husky, “Have some explaining to do.”

…

 

It wasn’t until we were back inside that I realized that I had no idea how to explain anything. I’d wordlessly led him back to my pod, mind unclear and foggy and all too sharp-edged to give a shit if anyone saw us.  
“What do you want to know?” I asked, sitting on the edge of my slat, at eye level with the still standing Karkat. It was surprising how fast I forgot what it was like to kiss him, forgot the heat he’d buried under my skin. I was frozen again.

“What happened to your face?” he asked, not backing away to his own pod but staying right there close to me. “You freaked when I touched the scar there.”

Arguments sprang to mind. (You don’t get to unlock my tragic backstory)(Why the hell should you even care)(Kiss me again and make me forget all about it).

The truth fell out instead. “I got hit.”

His expression was careful. “By who?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said, “It wasn’t the first time he hit me and it certainly wasn’t the last.”

He squinted at the mark. “That’s not something a fist would make.” He said.

“It was a sword.” I said, unwillingly and slow. The words drug on their way out, scraping my throat raw. “I was twelve at the time.”

“Jesus.”

“I told you he was a prepper, right? My older brother and guardian?” I said, choking back a laugh. Something was broken inside me. “He was always so obsessed with training and getting stronger and being prepared. He drilled it into me everyday. He was so convinced that the end of the world was coming, but then we come down here to visit my cousins and the actual apocalypse hits and what good does all of that do him? Gets fucking killed on day one.”

“Dave…”

“It’s not like he ever gave a shit about zombies though.” I said tonelessly. “For him, the end was always going to be some kind of meteor apocalypse. I’m fairly certain he had some type of psychosis. It’s ironic, right?”

“Dave, stop.” Karkat said. “This isn’t helping.”

“Actually, I think it is.” I said. “No one knows. Not even Rose or Dirk or Roxy. I’ve never told them.”

“Why?”

“Because by the time I could he was dead and we had bigger problems on our hands.” I admitted. “I was raised by an abusive bastard who never gave a single fuck about my well-being and beat the shit out of me daily. Why tell them when the problem’s over? It’s not like they could have helped and we were fuck deep in zombies by then.”

Karkat was pacing in front of my pod, his shorter frame tense and wary.

“Why tell me then?” he demanded.

“Because you asked.” I said, “No one else has.”

I was broken. I was fucked up. I was nothing nothing nothing NOTHING……..

He stopped, that same pissed twist to his mouth that he got when he knew he had to be careful.

When did I start noticing these things about him? My heartbeat was ticking like a clock inside me, winding down, everything leading to this one moment.

“You fucking idiot,” he murmured, “Move over.”

With a snap, everything came into focus again. I fell out of my own head and landed hard right there in my body on the thin mattress beside him.

Karkat pushed himself up onto my pod, foot using the metal frame as a step for his shorter legs to reach easier. He sat beside me silently, legs swinging over the edge of the drop.

I slowly let my head drop onto his shoulder, slowly, making sure that this was okay.

The junction of his neck and shoulder was warm and solid. Wordlessly, he linked his hand through mine.

“I swear I’m not broken.” I said, the words nearly swallowed up by the soft fabric of his hoodie.

“I know,” he said, the hand not holding mine fumbling at his throat. He drew out a necklace, a chain with a silver cross on the end I hadn’t seen before.

“This was my father’s.” He whispered, the pendant dangling on its thin chain. “He was one of those traveling pastors, and he gained a huge following. I never remember staying in one place for too long before we had to leave again. We came to this city once a year. It’s how I know most of my group. My father was always going from place to place, teaching the Good Word out of The Good Book.”

We stayed like that, my head on his shoulder, the cross in his fingers while he talked.

“I had a brother too.” He admitted, nearly fumbling the words in his mouth. “Kankri. He was five years older than me and was my father made over. He ran some kind of online social justice blog and had thousands of followers. He even wrote and published his own self-help book. It made my Dad so proud to see my brother following in his footsteps. To him, Kankri could do not one fucking thing wrong.”

Karkat sighed, and the cross vanished inside of his now clenched fist.

“Unlike me.” he snorted, and I could hear his breathing speed up.

“I was always fucking up, always have been. He never even meant to have me, told me he was happy with just one son, but then my mother died in childbirth and he was left with a red-eyed freak that half his following thought was a demon.”

His voice was hardened. “I was his embarrassment. Every time he checked the mail and saw where followers had sent him instructions on how to perform an exorcism I knew he honestly considered it, if only for a second. Then he found out I was gay and it was like he’d found proof that the insane church goers were right all along. His freak son had been personally sent by Satan to destroy him.”

“Karkat.” I didn’t know what to say. My brother did a lot of shitty things, but at least he never thought I was an agent of the Devil.

“There was this massive fight about it and honestly that’s the only reason we were still in town with all the others when the virus hit.” He continued. “He never came home from the store that afternoon. This was all before everyone knew that the dead were walking and that people killed by the virus came back to kill their neighbors. All I know about it was that Kankri got worried and went after him. My brother was gone for a few hours and came back a completely different person. He’d seen the zombies and freaked the fuck out.”

Karkat continued, his voice growing strained.

“It was him that got me to the high school and made sure we made it through those first few days. We survived, but he never recovered from the loss of everything he ever had. It made him withdrawn and manic and paranoid. When we ran out of food and the group was going to move out, he flat out refused. He wouldn’t let me go either, tried to tie me to the stairwell. I still have scars from the ropes around my wrists. He was talking crazy, wild and frantic, and I guess a part of me knew what he was going to do but it took too long for me to tear myself free. I guess it broke his faith to see the dead rise, or maybe he did find our father and it wasn’t good, but whatever the cause he took the easy way out. I found him dead with the gun still in his hand. We left later that afternoon.”

He was trying hard not to cry.

“Shit man.” I said. “What do you want me to say to that?” Karkat was shaking, breathing fractured and broken, and nearly hyperventilating. I pulled him into an embrace, whispered words of comfort pouring out of me. I remembered him saying he’d watched his brother die, but I’d never imagined it like this.

“I want you to say,” Karkat gasped out. “That I’m not broken either. That we’re all a little fucked up, and life’s a little fucked up, and all we can hope for is to be mutually fucked up together.”

I held him close. “It’s okay, it’s alright Karkat. It’s going to be alright.”

“We both know it’s not.” He said, “The world’s fallen to shit around us. Then you sweep in when I’m at the end of my fucking rope and bring us here to this place and suddenly everything makes sense again and I don’t have to worry about seeing my friends starve to death in the cold.”

“Isn’t that the point of all of this?” I said, “To recover what we lost.”

“I wish,” Karkat said, shuddering and running a hand across his eyes to hide the evidence of tears. “But to be perfectly honest, I’m still fucking terrified. Every goddamn day I’m afraid of waking up and fucking up and having friends dying because of me. Because of my mistakes. Because I wasn’t able to protect them.”

“I have that fear too.” I said slowly, “We’ve both lost people. We both know what it’s like to come up short.”

There was a pause after the weight of my words.

“What are we doing?” Karkat asked, turning to face me and pulling my head off of his shoulder so that I had to lean down to stare into his eyes. “Tell me this isn’t as insane as I think it is.”

The corner of my mouth quirked up. “Oh no, it’s definitely insane.” I told him, “But that doesn’t make it a bad thing.”

I kissed him then, because he was so very kissable and I was quickly becoming addicted to the taste of him.

“What does this make us?” Karkat asked, breathing the words into my mouth, his hand tangling in my hair. My head fell back at the gentle pressure and his lips found my neck. I tried to string thoughts together into words.

“Co-leaders.” I answered breathlessly.

“Uh huh,” Karkat said, kissing deeper and trailing down to the junction of neck and shoulder, his free hand on my leg. I was having trouble concentrating. “What else?”

His hand moved around to swipe along my inner thigh and I swear my focus shattered.

“Bastard.”

“Ha,” he said, mouth moving back to mine. I leaned into the kiss with my whole body.

“Does this answer your question?” I asked smugly, nipping at his ear. If he wanted to play dirty…

“Douche.” He whispered, nearly groaning. “Fuck.”

I smiled into his skin as I pulled away. My head was spinning and I could feel a flush of hot blood in my face. Karkat’s eyes were smoldering crimson pools as I gently led his hand back to his chest. The necklace, nearly forgotten, was returned to its place where his collarbones framed that small hollow of dark flesh at the base of his throat.

“We should probably get back to work before Rose or Kanaya comes after us.” I said unwillingly, blinking fiercely beneath my shades. “I think they both have some insidious plan to get us together.”

Karkat sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “God help us if they find us like this.”

I kissed him one last time, deeply and thoroughly, until I was lightheaded. Then we straightened our clothes and hair and went back to work.

…

 

The next two weeks passed without a hitch. With more people, we were able to build the outdoor chicken run and finish the harvest from the roof. Corn could be dried and stored and not a single kernel went to waste. With more people, I could send larger scouting parties out into the city, and we brought in over a hundred bolts of fabric from a Hobby Lobby, bringing back anything from heavy curtain material to fleece.   
Kanaya quickly began making winter coats for us all out of the new fabric, and there was enough left over for a hundred more coats and jackets and shirts and whatever else we needed.

We also followed Karkat’s original idea of leaving flyers, with instructions stating that it would be checked for other survivors once every three days.

I didn’t expect anything to come from them. There had been a year between finding Jane and finding Karkat’s group. 

He told me that they’d run into survivors before and that most of the time they tried to kill them.

I said it was for his missing group mates. There might have been a miracle and if they were still alive they deserved a safe haven too.

Our nanny goat had a set of twins and so our number of goats went up to five. Things were looking good.

And if I took a few minutes of the day to seek out Karkat, to tug him away from working himself into exhaustion, to claim his lips as mine, who cared?

I was happy. The entire world had ended, but hey, I was happy.

At last, i was happy.

Karkat and I weren’t the only new couple. Rose and Kanaya were also together, much to no one’s surprise.

Jane, Roxy, Nepeta, Terezi, and Eridan had gone out to check the firehouse today for survivors. I was still waiting for them to return.

The chill in the air was stronger today, nearly enough to make me wish for a jacket. According to Rose’s calendar today was the first of December. Winter was here. I guessed it was pure luck it wasn’t already freezing.

I was on the roof, my breath visible in the air. The carrots were growing well. We would wait until as much time had passed as possible before harvesting them. Little did I know, but carrots actually didn’t give seed until their second year, the little bastards.

That forced us to bring them in to protect them from the cold, a job for another day. I didn’t want to break my back moving dirt and carrots downstairs when the scouting party was due back any minute.  
From the roof, I could see the instant when the team appeared behind the Wal-Mart as a bunch of blurry moving shapes. An instant later, after their figures condensed and solidified, I knew that something was wrong.

They were moving too fast, nearly sprinting across the lot towards the safety of the Club. Hair at the back of my neck prickled.

I was moving back downstairs a second later.

“Jade, Jake, Vriska, get to the roof! Arm yourselves and be ready. The team’s returning and something’s up.” I yelled, voice echoing off of the high ceilings.

John appeared at my side, hammer in hand. “What’s going on?”

“No idea.” I said, still moving to the door with a hand on my sword. “But something isn’t right.”

Sollux was there too, hands dripping red and blue wires. “Did you send up an alarm?”

“Yes, make sure everyone is ready for whatever it is.” I ordered, nearly at the door. “John, stay beside me. Sollux, send three more people outside after us okay? I want to be ready.”

Sollux’s thin shoulders shrugged. “Whatever you say.” The 3-D glasses normally perched on his nose were folded at his breast, and I noted that his eyes were two different colors when they weren’t hidden behind shades of red and blue.

I threw open the door. Cold air rushed against my skin. I could see my breath fog in the air.

The team was almost at the gate, and the first thing I noted besides the fact that a massive horde of the undead was not following them like I’d feared was the fact that Eridan looked fucking pissed.

The next was that there were six people in the group, not five.

Jane helped me drag back the gate from the outside and let them in. My mind was working on autopilot.

“Holy shit,” I heard John say, but I didn’t turn around, focused on locking the gate, on being safe first. My hands were steady, I didn’t fumble with the chain as I slipped it through and pulled it tight, the mechanically autonomous motion of the action shielding me until I steeled myself and turned around.

Roxy’s face was murder, and her arm was around a slim girl I had never seen before. Her pale hair held a strange tint to it, like it had once been dyed the color green before it faded back to a light blonde. There was a streak of old blood on her face, centering in on one cheek that was a mess of red and purple and black so thick the skin was obscured beneath the layer of grime. 

But her eyes, a brilliant green, were bright and keen and deep pools of sorrow.

Roxy still had an arm around her protectively, like she was ready to fight anyone who was a threat. I’d never seen my cousin look so murderous before.

“Please,” The strange girl pleaded, her voice a lilting trill in a crisp accent similar to Jake’s, “You have to help me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who could this new person be?  
> Its time to move the plot along...


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please make sure to read the bottom notes. I'll be making some changes...  
> Anyway- here's the new chapter!

Chapter eight

I blinked down at the girl, a part of me screaming with excitement that we’d found a new survivor so quickly, but that voice was drowned out beneath the crushing wave of knowledge that something was not right here.

I realized I hadn’t answered her question yet. Focus Dave.

“Alright, it’s alright, you’re safe now.” I said, trying to buy myself the time to think. She said she needed help. There had to be some second meaning there, or was I being paranoid?

“What seems to be the problem here?” I asked, dropping every trace of the friendly Dave who welcomed in new people with a smile. I dropped the hand resting on my sword, even though the action didn’t make me feel any better. My heart was beating like a drum, pounding like a clock, rushing pulses and lulls inside of my chest.

Roxy met my eyes with a hard expression.

“We found her wandering around underneath the I-20 southbound.” She said. “You should listen to what she has to say.”

I was suddenly aware of Karkat at my side, and a knot of tension loosened. I took a deep breath, Karkat stern-faced and solid at my side. 

“Let’s go somewhere more private,” I said, aware of the entire group’s eyes on us. The girl nodded, her face wan and exhausted, green eyes etched hard in permanent dark circles inked under her skin. One socket held the mark of a fading black eye underneath the dirt.

“You know we can’t take her inside,” Karkat said, “It’s too risky, and there’s everyone else in there.”

“I know,” I said, “I’m not planning to.”

“Dave,” Roxy warned, her voice sharp and dangerous.

I reached into a pocked and pulled out a red bandana.

“Roxy, can I speak with our new guest please?”

“Dave!” Roxy tried to swipe the strip of cloth out of my hand, knowing my intentions. My reflexes were faster than hers though, and I snapped the bandana to safety.

“Trust me Roxy,” I asked quietly, “Do you think I’ll let anything happen to her?”

She gnawed at her bottom lip, tongue pulling the flesh between her teeth ad worrying down on it with anxious vigor. “I will give you one hour,” she said fiercely, her arm tightening around the slim girl’s shoulders, “Then I’m going to get her back.” She promised grimly. “She needs self-care and a shower and food and a warm bed, not your endless questions.”

“You sound a little like Rose,” I smiled at her, just a twitch of the lips. “I swear. One hour.”

My cousin wasn’t happy, but she slowly drew back her arm. The girl swayed without the support for a second, then squared her shoulders boldly and raised her battered chin at me.

“Do you trust me?” I asked her, wringing the red bandana in my hands.

“No.” Her eyes glittered.

“Good.” I said. “Now hold very still.”

She stood and let me gently loop the cloth over her eyes in a blindfold.

“Follow me, and no peeking please.” I said.

Karkat began barking orders. “Nepeta, get everyone away. Back to work. There’s nothing to see here. Vriska! Put the gun down! Jesus Christ, what the fuck are you thinking?”

The crowd slowly cleared off, and Karkat and I wordlessly let the strange girl straight through the club as fast as we could, all the way across the huge store and out the other side. Karkat swung the doors shut behind us and locked the chain again as I swiftly undid the loose knot on the red cloth and let it fall away.

The girl’s eyes flew wide and her mouth fell open into a perfect circle of surprise. “Ohhh!”

“It’s alright, they don’t bite.” I promised, but it wasn’t with fear that she stared at the goats, not even when one came up and nibbled delicately at the ragged end of her skirt until she ruffled the fur around his horns, scratching at his ears like he was a cat. The brown spotted goat loved it.

Karkat drug over a wooden bench made out of shipping crates. Nothing green grew back here. The goats prevented that. It was still a beautiful place, and I let her drink in the sounds and smells of the animals for a moment, Roxy’s hour warning ticking away in my mind the entire time.

She didn’t stay occupied for long. “May I sit?” she asked politely. Karkat nodded and she folded her legs up, bird-like, and sat.

She took a seat opposite of Karkat and me.

“Let’s start this easy,” I said, “I’m Dave, and this is Karkat. We’re the co-leaders here.”

“I am called Calliope.” The girl said, “And-”

I saw the instant when her eyes went unfocused as she looked Karkat in the face, saw the half-second of dismay when green eyes met blood-red. She recovered herself quickly and with grace, and Karkat said nothing about the slight stumble even as her eyes cut back to my shades again.

“Th, thank you for bringing me in.” Calliope said. “Not many would this day and age.”

“You said that you needed help.” I shrugged, putting out an air of nonchalance I knew Karkat saw as the pure bullshit it was.

“I’m sure that you want to know everything about me,” she said, her eyes looking down at the ground and her voice small and quiet.

“Where were you found?” Karkat asked.

“I’m not sure exactly where, but I was first spotted by your search party under an overpass. There was a Taco Bell nearby, I remember that much.”

Are you alone? I left that question unasked. 

“Were you armed?” I said instead.

“I had a revolver with me, but by then the chambers were all empty.”

Karkat met my sideways look. Not a single shot left, not one for a zombie and not one for herself. That spoke of either a dangerous recklessness or a certain hard will to live. Looking at the bloodied girl before me, I wasn’t sure which was true.

“What brought you to the city?” I asked gently.

“I was running.” Her face snapped up to mine, her eyes going all frantic. “Please, you have to help me. They’re following me and I can’t let them catch me again, I can’t. Please. I can’t go through that again.” Her hand flew to her cheek, to the blackness and the scabbing and wounded skin there. Sudden tears choked her voice, and her distress brought over her friend the goat who put his horned head in her lap.

“Hold on, who’s after you?” I said, growing more and more uneasy at all of this. Something was not right.

“My brother, my twin. He, he’s the leader of a huge group. But it’s not a group- it’s a cult. They kill people.”

Karkat picked at his teeth with a thumbnail, looking so intent that he didn’t notice what he was doing with his hands.  
Cult. Kill people. This wasn’t good.

“This cult, led by your brother, you said they might be after you?” I asked seriously.

She nodded furiously. “I ran away once before, but they tracked me down and dragged me back. They said, he said-” The words choked off with a gasp.

It’s alright.” I told her quickly. She started shaking. “We’ve got you. We won’t let anyone hurt you.”

Her eyes sharpened. “No. You don’t know.” She whispered fearfully. “You don’t know what he’s like. When they caught me before they,” Her hand drifted back to the charred spot on her face, the blackened skin, the blood. “He branded me. With his cult’s sigil, so that everyone would know to whom I belonged.”

I was sickened. She met my eyes with a challenge and a hint of fire. “I’m not going to go back.”

She sat there, her fingers tangled in the goat’s fur, hair ragged and faded. Hell, her everything was ragged and faded and bloody, but her eyes were sharp and alert and there was steel buried there. I could feel it.

“You won’t have to.” Karkat spoke for me, for once his voice gentle and soothing. “We won’t throw you out. This brother of yours, he can fuck right off and go to hell. No crazy cult leader’s going to get you here.”

I was still reeling from the knowledge that some crazy killer cult was out there, but I wasn’t too surprised. Mankind was capable of horrible things and some people reacted badly to the apocalypse. With how the world was before, I guessed it was too much to ask that all the murderers died out.

“How many people does your brother have?” I asked curiously.

“Over fifty.” She said, her voice growing stronger. “Most of them are only there because they’re too afraid to leave. He rules through fear and he has a smaller group of dedicated worshippers that follow his every command. They think it’s their job to destroy mankind, that our corruption was the reason for the virus and that through killing they become pure again. It’s insane. Its barbaric and monstrous and I couldn’t stay there a second longer.”

“Yep, sounds like a cult.” I said stupidly, my mouth running on autopilot. I struggled to reign it in. “Listen Calliope, it’s going to be okay. But I need you to tell me everything.”

And she did.

“We were a normal family once,” she began with a faltering tone that only grew more even as she went on and gained confidence. “My twin was never normal though. He was always… Off somehow. Like the reflection in a funhouse mirror. It was him, but I could always tell that something wasn’t quite right with him. He hid it well, and whenever the town we were staying in began to get suspicious of where all the stray dogs were going our parents would move us again. I think that maybe they knew it too. Then the virus hit.”

There was a slight pause, and she swallowed thickly and continued.

“My dad fell sick. We didn’t know any better, so when he died we tried to bury him in the backyard but he, he came back and bit our mother. It wasn’t him. It was a monster that looked like him. He must have been one of the first to rise again because no one knew about the zombies at that point. My brother put him down with the shovel, and I held my mother as she cried. I remember him turning back to us, the gory shovel in hand and a grin on his face. It only got worse from there...”

“Jesus.” Karkat whispered under his breath, just so I could hear.

Calliope continued.

“Our mother left us before she turned. That’s the one thing I’m glad about. I never had to watch her die. But my brother, he loved the violence the apocalypse brought. He loved the fighting and the killing and the zombies in the shadows. He said that this was what he loved, where he felt he fit in. We fell in with a bigger group of survivors in Kentucky, and before I knew it he was winning them over with his charm and wit and skill with a gun. In battle he was ruthless, and it wasn’t long before the periods of peace began to chafe at him as the danger lessened as we figured out how to survive. I’m not sure when the killing started. At first it was the weak, those who couldn’t defend themselves. Then it was strangers who might have been a threat. Then they began hunting down survivors and he was talking crazy about a new world order built of blood and death. It went on and on and it kept growing and getting worse and I didn’t notice what was happening to my brother until it was too late to stop him. No one ever tried to stop him. I don’t know why no one ever thought what he was doing was wrong and intervened before things got so bad. It was like one day I opened my eyes and looked around and realized all at once I was part of a cult.”

“So you ran.” I said. The sun passed behind a cloud, and a shadowed chill fell over us.

“Yes.” She said, breathlessly laughing, a nervous sound. “It all seems so strange said aloud like that. The second time I managed to throw them off when I crossed a river. I’ve been wandering south even since.”

“How long were you alone?” I asked.

“Three weeks maybe. I’m not sure. I took a chill after crossing the river and was down with a fever for some time. Things got blurry then and I lost track of time until I recovered.”

“I’m not surprised.” Karkat said, “While we were wandering still, we ran into a few crazy and more violent groups. One probably was similar to this cult of yours and immediately tried to kill us all. Not all of us escaped.”

Karkat reached out and gently rested a hand on the goats head beside her own hand. He kept his eyes down and spoke quietly as his fingers moved through the stiff fur there. “Whatever you’ve done or seen, that can be behind you now, if you let it. We’ve all got shit to deal with here.”

A moment passed, full of unsaid things.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, wiping at her eyes. I cleared my throat.

I would have said something, but suddenly Roxy appeared, with Feferi and Jane in tow.

“Time’s up.” She said smugly, popping the P on the up. “Now run along and let the ladies do their work.”

Calliope stood gracefully and brushed goat hair off her skirt, dislodging the animal with a disgruntled bleat. “What are you going to do with me?”

Jane held up a bundle of clothes.

“Well, first you can have a shower and some hot food.” Roxy said happily.

Calliope blinked at them silently.

“Then you can pick out a room and have a tour of the Club and meet everybody.” Roxy said. “They’re all curious about you.”

“I…I,” The girl stuttered, wide-eyed.

“It’s alright.” Karkat offered. “I didn’t believe it either. Not at first.”

Feferi reached out a hand to Calliope. “I’m so excited to meet you!”

They led a stumbling and shy Calliope away. When they had passed out of sight through the doors I turned to Karkat.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Yes,” he said grimly. “Let’s go hunting…”

…

 

Immediately groups went out to remove every single flyer we’d posted. Right now with a killer cult on the loose they were nothing but a threat. A danger. Something to be removed with all possible haste.  
I made sure two rooftop snipers were posted at all times, even at night. We cut back on daytime fires so that no smoke would be visible in the sky.

“Do you think it will be enough?” Karkat asked, for once silent at my side.

“We’re pretty boxed in back here.” I pointed out. “Trees on two sides, a fence line and a pond, and then the parking lot. They’d have to go through the Wal-Mart to see us.”

“Unless they see the Sam’s Club out front by the road and think to do some shopping.” He said darkly.

“Fuck.” I said, groaning. “We should really remove that. Find some way to cut it down.”

“It would make too much noise.” He reminded me.

“Then we’ll burn it.” I said stubbornly. “Wait for a foggy morning and light it the fuck up.”

“Yeah, I’m sure no one would notice that.” Karkat agreed sarcastically. “Not unless they had working eyeballs. What the fuck Dave?”

“I’m trying my best here.” I defended myself quickly, resisting the urge to draw my sword, strike something, anything to calm me down. To make the unrelenting vigilance and the crushing weight of responsibility disappear. “Do you think I’m being paranoid?” I asked.

He kissed me, lips lingering on mine. Calm spread through me, radiating out from where his skin touched my own and spreading from there until I could breathe again.

“No,” he whispered, “I don’t.”

…

 

Five days passed. Rose was keeping a calendar counting down until Christmas, and an extremely shitty tree was set up by the front door. It was an honest-to-God awful tree.  
Several people were happily decorating it with a collection of handmade ornaments, equally as shitty as the half-dead pine tree itself.

“What do you think?” Rose asked, taking a step back to survey her work. Kanaya was attempting to balance a star made of tinfoil on top, but the tree had no visible main top and the branches she tried sagged under the weight of the ornament until it hung upside down.

“This?” I jerked a thumb at the monstrosity behind me. “This is probably the worst tree ever erected in the history of Christmas.”

My cousin frowned at me.

“Really,” I said honestly. “If Santa saw it he’d die of a heart attack after burning down the building around our sleeping bodies to rid the world forever of our massive failure of a healthy Christmas Spirit.”

“Do you really mean that?” she said, raising a patented Lalonde eyebrow at me.

“No Rose,” I said, smiling up at the Christmas tree. “It’s perfect.”

Kanaya finally managed to thoroughly tie down the star right side up about a foot from the malformed top.

“There,” she said, climbing sown the ladder to stand at Rose’s side. “I believe that will suffice.”

“It’s beautiful.” Rose said, leaning into the other girl’s side and twining their fingers together.

Calliope appeared from around the corner, nearly skipping. It was amazing how much she’d changed in only a few days. The mark on her cheek was obvious when it wasn’t obscured beneath a layer of blood, ash, and dirt. A raised coil of burned flesh, a counter-clockwise spiral of pink scar tissue pressed deeply into the loose skin of her cheek to form an ugly wound. It was several weeks healed, but the skin looked tender and new. Raw. 

The sight made me angry. The sight made me want to hate this twin brother of hers. The sight made a foul taste rise to the back of my throat.

“How are you doing?” I asked her as she spun to a graceful halt in front of the tree.

“I’m doing very well now,” she said, “Roxy has been teaching me about the irrigation systems.”

Before I could reply, Jade rushed over to where we were with an angry Karkat at her side.

“Dave, we heard gunshots from the city.” Jade’s rifle was in her hands and her voice was dark. “Whoever it is that's shooting, they're getting closer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to take a week break before posting the rest of the story. I'm sorry.  
> My brother got in a really bad car accident this morning and I just need to focus on my family right now. With all the police and hospital things I just can't...  
> He's hurt. Wasn't wearing a seatbelt and went through the windshield. He should recover soon, but I'm going to take a break. With the traveling and now this I don't have the time to write right now and I don't want the quality of my writing to suffer.  
> I only posted this chapter because it was already done. I'll start posting again in a week, on the seventh.  
> I'm just happy he's alive right now.  
> Happy birthday to me...


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back and will start regular updates again!  
> Thank you everyone for being so patient and understanding.

Chapter Nine

I hurried to the rooftop. Eridan and Vriska were there as well, zooming across the lot with their scopes.

“Have you seen anything?” Karkat asked, and right then a barrage of muffled gunfire rang out. 

The shots echoed around us, distorted and warped, but near enough to make me more than uncomfortable. We all froze at the noise.

“Shit.” I said under my breath, then spoke louder. “That’s machine gun fire.”

“What do you think they’re firing at?” Jade said grimly. The sound of the shots would draw in every zombie that could hear.

“Roxy,” I called, and she turned her heat to me, “Go make sure everyone is here and accounted for, then use the weapons wall to arm everyone. I’m not going to have us get caught with our pants down.”

My cousin quickly hurried back through the vegetables and down the stairs.

“Do you think it might be those cultists?” Vriska asked, not once looking up from her rifle, the single eye not covered by the eyepatch was trained through the scope with an intense focus. “I hope so. I mean to pay them back for that mark on Calliope’s pretty face.” The girl’s voice was vicious.

Calliope had paled, the grin falling off her face. 

“Let me know if you see anything.” I ordered, “And do not fire unless me or Karkat gives the order.”

Eridan and Jade nodded. Vriska said nothing, but she made a show of turning the safety on again on her rifle with several sarcastic flips of the fingers. She made sure I saw her flipping me off as she did it.  
I ignored the rude gesture. I had bigger things to worry about.

Roxy reappeared, leading Jake and John behind her. John was carrying a bag of rifles and ammunition in his arms. He quickly began to pass them out.

“I want four snipers on the roof at all times until this danger has passed.” Karkat ordered.

“Two teams of four each,” I elaborated, building the plan as I spoke, “Vriska, Eridan, and two others on the first team. The second with Jake, Jade, and two others. I want two professionals and two novices. Two people should be actively on watch at all times. Rotate the shifts out between yourselves and immediately report anything new. Understood?”

They all nodded silently along with me. Everyone knew how serious this was.

Lockdown procedures were initiated at once. Every gate was chained shut, twice. All doors were closed and the old fat dog was brought inside so he wouldn’t bark at passing pigeons. The goats were left alone outside. There wasn’t anything we could do about them and their quiet occasional bleats.

Rose forced her way to my side from the bustling crowd of people rushing to get things done.

“Dave,” she called out, “What are you going to do?”

Karkat, I thought. Where was Karkat?

“I’m going to go see who it is.” I said.

Rose smacked my arm lightly, or would have if my own hand hadn’t snapped up instinctively to block the gentle blow, locking my fingers hard around her slim wrist. I released her at once, but her eyes were wide and shocked.

“Sorry Rose,” I apologized, “I guess I’m a little on edge right at the moment.”

She put the occurrence behind her with a burst of hardened determination. “What do you mean you’re going to see who it is?”

I stopped walking beside the chicken pen, eyeing the roosters.

“If those fuckers start a crow-off I’ll have their heads.” I said darkly, eyeballing Noir in particular.

“Dave I’m serious.” Rose said. “That is a horrible idea.”

I knew it was. I didn’t need Rose to tell me that. I also didn’t need a surprise Lalonde analytical assessment of my mental health. Not now, not ever. I just couldn’t deal with all of this happening at the same time. Something had to get pushed to the side and right now my emotions were looking like prime real estate to get locked away.

“What else do you want me to do?” I asked, a little louder than anticipated. I forced my voice lower.

“Listen,” I strained, “What if it isn’t the cultists? What if it’s another little band of survivors in need of help? What if it’s just one guy? What if it is the cultists and we need to know how many there are and where they are? What if it’s a second unrelated bunch of psychotic murderers who all what to kill us? What if-”

She held up her hand, waving away my explanations. “Fine, I can see your point.” Her eyes were unflinching and grave. “But it’s too dangerous.”

“That’s why I have to go.” I said, hand on my sword. Mentally I was already preparing myself for the trip outside. I would need food and a map and ammunition. “I can’t ask anyone else to do this.” I said. 

“You were always the one to take risks like this,” Rose said, growing angry now, “But it was different when it was just us eight! You can’t afford to do that now. What if something happens? We need you here. You’re someone we can all listen to with no questions asked. You’re the leader Dave.”

Everything around me seemed to jolt to a halt. The crowd of people around us slowed, stretched-out and unreal. We were floating. I was falling.

Falling. I scrambled for control, ice flooding my veins.

“I’m not.” I said coldly. “At most I’m half a leader.”

My skin was crawling. Somewhere in my head, the locked box where I kept my worst memories gave a sickening twitch. “I’m not a leader.” I repeated.

“You became one the instant you figured out how to do this.” Rose said, waving a hand around us to the other teens, the Club itself.

“You did most of the hard things, and Jane and Jade did the plants.” I protested. “And Dirk and Jake-”

“Not that,” Rose answered sternly. “Not the technical things. You became a leader when you first started leading us. When you picked up that sword of yours and led us here, when you led us to lock the doors and hunt for food, when you made sure we would be alright- That’s when you became a leader.”

“I only did what I had to in order to protect everyone.” I said.

“You always do, Dave.” Rose said kindly. “We all know you always do.”

I swallowed hard, past a painful lump in my throat. Fucking psychology. Or was this reverse-psychology?

Whatever the reason, I couldn’t argue this anymore. Not with Rose’s cool and collected steel eyes on me. I just didn’t have it in me. This was one fight I wasn’t up for. Not today. 

“What do you want me to do?” I asked. My hand fell from the hilt at my belt as I let it go.

“You could let me fucking handle this.”

I nearly flinched at the sudden voice. It was too loud and too close all at once, but the scratchy voice was familiar and soothing and I just wanted-

Just wanted.

I just needed-

Karkat stood there, twin sickles shining in his hands, red eyes blazing with fire.

“Dave,” he said, snapping me out of the dissociated daze I’d fallen into. Everything came rushing back at once, a barrage of colors and sounds and the taste of fear in my mouth.

“No.” I said. The image resolved itself and clicked together, piecing the meaning of his sickles and determined look at once. “Oh hell no.”

“Dave,” he said again, “You know why this has to happen.”

“And I retain my right to ignore your logic in favor of me continuing my plan without you. It’s a perk of the apocalypse. Logical thinking can kiss my ass.”

“And if you don’t let me do this I’m going to kick your ass.” Karkat shot back. “You know Rose is right about us.”

He moved to stand at her side, both of them standing against me and blocking the way to the door with their bodies. Determination was starkly outlined on their faces, each holding a different type of fire in their eyes.

Rose was cool, calm, and collected. She was an unmovable object, a frozen mountain, a still pool of deep water with no reflections. She was certainty. She was the dark beyond the candle’s light.

Karkat was the opposite. He was a raging fire- light, heat, and scorch. He was an unstoppable force, passion and mystery, twist and snap. He was a tornado with a fire in his heart that burned out to all the world to see through his eyes. He was force of nature, something wild and untamable and utterly devastating. 

Oh God, I loved them both so much. So much it hurt. It was a splinter lodged raw and throbbing in my heart. 

The realization knocked the fight out of me. It wasn’t weakness. I shut out the inner voice yelling at me that it was. 

Weakness. Coward. Fight harder. Don’t let this happen protect them protect her protect him protect protect protect protect protect protect …..

Weakness. (It wasn’t.)

There was a new feeling flowing through me, something staggering in its depth and strength. It was respect (Was it? Really?) for them both and respect for their wishes that led me to back down. I gritted my teeth still, because knowing didn’t make this any easier.

“There will be rules.” I said, scrubbing at the skin of my face with my knuckles, trying to erase the tingling there. I was falling.

He nodded sharply.

I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and faced them both. If they wanted to act serious I could be serious and meet them step for step. Blow for fucking blow. “You will take three others with you. No snipers. Three days.”

My word was absolute Law. I was a train engine speeding down the track. Cross me at your own risk.

I was falling.

“That’s all I’m asking for.” Karkat said. My lungs filled, air moving within me. Nothing seemed to come out.

“I’m not done,” I warned. “You leave in the morning, and I swear to God if your ass isn’t back here in three days…” I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t need to.

He understood.

…

 

Karkat chose a good team to accompany him. Dirk, Equius, and Nepeta. A team built to be swift, completely lethal, and entirely unseen.

I would have chosen the same.

That didn’t make it hurt less to watch him pack up his bag, to know that he was leaving and I was not.

The afternoon, just to spite me I’m sure, flashed past in a smattering of hours. The sun fell lower and lower in the sky, turning the clouds bloody.

Dinner was eggs and chicken and corn and I didn’t taste any of it.

The sniper’s guard changed.

The two roosters crowed.

Night fell way too fast.

By the common coincidence born of my terrible sleeping habits I was still wide awake and pacing the floor of the Club when most of us had gone to sleep. Karkat was also still awake.

It was coincidence. Nothing more. We were both raging insomniacs. 

Normally it was me lying awake, listening to him stalk up and down the aisles of pods from my bed.

But everything had fallen out of order today and nothing was the same as it had been when the sun first rose.

I forced myself to stop my worthless walking and go to bed, but even inside my pod with the curtains closed I was restless and aching. The knowledge that Karkat was just across the aisle sat heavy in me like a stone in my gut.

It was dark. The Club was silent and asleep, but I could hear Karkat tossing and turning across from me. The longer I lay there, the sharper my hearing became. I could hear the rustle of clothing, fabric on fabric, hear every small noise he made.

The noises were driving me insane. I wasn’t sure how much more of this torture I could take before I flew right off the fucking handle and went crazy and did something stupid that I knew I would regret.

Just then I heard Karkat let out a noise of frustration, heard the draw of fabric being flung aside. Footsteps across the cold floor, the sound leading right to me.

“Dave?” I heard him whisper, “Are you still awake?”

Holy hell.

“Yeah,” I whispered back, struggling to draw my thoughts together as they raced forward through several dozen scenarios that might happen next, each one more ridiculous than the last. “I’m still awake.”

“Mind if I come in?”

This could not be happening.

“Ye, yeah,” I stuttered. “S’no problem.”

I could only faintly see his outline against the dark fabric of the curtains over the front of my pod. With a shaking hand I drew the fabric back, revealing him standing barefoot and unarmed in the dim lighting.

A part of me knew that this was alright, that Karkat had been in my pod before, that this didn’t mean anything.

But the sun had set. In the morning he was leaving, and anything could happen outside in the ruined city. 

I could see the knowledge shining in his eyes. He knew what he was doing just as much as I did.

“Scoot over,” he said, lifting himself up and into my pod. The weight of him compressed the thin mattress till springs popped and bounced. I backed away until the edge of the steel frame pressed against my back.  
He settled silently beside me, stretching out alongside the edge of the bed. He faced the ceiling, the rounded curve of his shoulder nearly touching me.

For just a moment we stayed like that, nearly touching. The minuscule spot of space between our bodies throbbed with unspoken want, growing and growing and I couldn’t take this I couldn’t and growing and growing and-

With a snap, everything changed.

Heat exploded along my hands as Karat swiftly rolled towards me, my arms pulling him closer as that spot of space between us was crushed out of existence as we reached for each other. His face was lifted to mine, just at the perfect angle for me to bring down my lips to meet his. 

I fumbled for my shades when the hard edge of them dug into his skin and pulled them from my face. I set them aside without turning away from Karkat.

“Were you planning on sleeping in those?” He breathed the words across my face, fingers splayed across my jaw.

“Probably. If I managed to sleep at all.” I said, running my hand down the curve of his back, over the scratchy material of his hoodie while the other hand tangled in the felts of his hair. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but I was surprised at the softness of the texture of his hair, the springy warmth of the tangled dreads where they absorbed the heat of his skin near the scalp. One black strand had fallen over his cheek and tickled where the end brushed against my nose.

My other fingers reached the end of his hoodie where a small strip of flesh was revealed at his side and I brushed my thumb across the skin there, playing with the edge of the hoodie as I saw his eyes flutter closed.

He was quick to shrug off the fabric, pulling it up and over his head and casting it aside before he got back down beside me and my hands hungrily sought to explore the exposed skin of his chest. My hands dragged across his muscled back, pulling him closer until I could feel the outline of his sternum against me, feel the rise and fall of his uneven breaths and the pulse pounding away at the hollow of his throat when I set my lips there, kissing just above the glint of silver that he wore around his neck.

Like this, it was easy to lose track of things. Thoughts. Cares. Anything that wasn’t in this exact moment wasn’t important. There was only Karkat and I, lying here together as I traced the dips and valleys of his ribs and spine, his teeth tugging gently at my bottom lip. 

I hesitated when his hands crept under my shirt, a dozen refusals and explanations dying on my tongue as his wrist pressed against my ear and I felt the thick bands of scarring there. He must have known by now, but knowing and seeing were two very different things.

“It’s alright,” he whispered roughly, drawing back just enough to stare into my eyes. 

He was leaving in the morning.

With shaking hands I peeled off my red and white shirt. There wasn’t time to take it back or change whatever outcome we were racing toward with such thoughtless actions. There wasn’t time to be self-conscious or regret my actions, but there was a single second where I was ashamed of myself for taking so long to realize that I could move past this. I could ignore the swirling torrent of memories that sought to attack me. I could beat them back and force them away. I didn’t have to live in fear of them any longer.

And I wouldn’t. I was done with being so afraid. I flung the shirt away from me, every part of myself unmasked and vulnerable.

Karkat said nothing as his hands gently traced the scars that marred my torso, slipping upwards to where one rib had healed crooked. His fingers ran along the edges of the bone where it ran uneven and sunk into my side. He met my eyes.

“They’re ugly, I know.” I said.

He didn’t lie and say they weren’t.

“I don’t care,” he said instead, truthfully. “I think you look beautiful. You are not these scars.”

My hands were trembling. “You can say it if you want. You don’t need to use some cliché movie one-liner about how I’m pretty on the inside. I know that I’m a mess.”

“Fucking hell Dave,” he said, and the tension broke. “You look like you went through a wood-chipper.”

He wasn’t too far off with that analogy. I was awash in a wave of relief. It was over. I’d done it. Karkat had seen my scars and he didn’t mind.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“You are also the palest fucking person I’ve ever seen. You practically glow like some kind of fucking human jack-o-lantern.” 

I couldn’t help but smile as I turned the subject to safer matters.

“You know,” I said, “For a preacher’s kid you sure do swear a lot.”

“Can you ever stop being a complete shitstain,” he asked, “And be serious for a moment?”

I pretended to think about it.

“I guess not.”

“Fucker.”

I kissed him again, just to hide my face against him until I had control of it again. I would not cry. Striders never cried.

(He was leaving in the morning.)

I kissed his wrists, where he wore bracelets of scar tissue from tearing free of ropes too late to change the outcome of anything.

(He might not come back.)

His breath caught, breathing out a needy noise as he threw a leg over mine and pulled me flush against his shirtless chest. This as the summation of all he was. This was his shape and breath, the way he held me close like I was something breakable and precious and something he could never let go of. I remembered him from the first time I’d seen him up until this point and could trace the line of fire and passion and stubborn refusal to roll over and let the world have him. I nipped at his collarbone until he let out a breathy laugh and my heart gave a strong squeeze in my chest and I realized that I loved him and that I couldn’t hide it from myself any longer.

I loved him.

I was in love with Karkat.

“Come back to me after tomorrow.” I said, “Promise.”

He pulled away slightly before he touched his forehead to mine, his eyes an inch away.

“I’ll do everything I can.” He swore. “Is that enough?”

The world we lived in was dangerous and violent. People died. We couldn’t afford to make promises like this without acknowledging the cost of the words and the risk of them becoming a lie. Survival was never a promise.

“For now, I’ll make it enough” I said, the raw splinter in my heart digging deeper and deeper. Love.

I kissed him one last time, and it wasn’t enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is kind of my favorite chapter so far...


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's only the first day of the new semester and the homework struggle is real...

I woke from sleep like one rising out of deep water, to gasp in a breath of consciousness with the warm body of Karkat still pressed gently against me in sleep. I had a rare moment of complete and total peace as I listened to his soft breathing.

His head was pillowed on my chest, the first rays of dawn’s light beginning to show gray through the curtains of my pod. I took a picture of this scene in my mind to hold it with me forever.

Karkat’s arm was thrown across my chest as he snuggled close to me. Like this, his hard edges were gone, smoothened out and softened with sleep. The backs of his eyelids fluttered, like he could feel me studying him, and his grip on me tightened as he curled closer, inhaling deeply as his eyes opened.

“Hey,” I said gently, and he met me with a content smile. God, he was beautiful. I swallowed thickly and shoved my selfishness away. The sun was rising. “It’s morning.”

He nodded wordlessly, murmuring an unintelligible sentence as he lay there for a second, memorizing the feel of this moment, before he pushed himself up onto his elbow and scrubbed at his eyes to take the sleep from them.

“Dave,” he said, his voice rough and scratchy and precious, “Thank you. For everything.”

“You don’t need to thank me,” I said honestly.

“Yes, I do.” He said, pulling his hoodie back over to him and shrugging it back over his shoulders. “You’re the one that saved me.”

I said nothing, a thousand things running across my mind that I could never set to words.

Karkat straightened his hoodie and stretched the softness out of his muscles until he was awake and limber, his sturdy frame ready for battle as he shook out his mane of dark hair.

He took a breath and readied himself to slid off the end of the bed and out through the curtains. I caught him by the sleeve right before he pushed himself off.

I drew his lips to me again, kissing deeply and thoroughly, and when I was finally pulled away by our shared responsibilities and the distant ring of Jane’s bell announcing the arrival of morning, I spoke.

“You saved me too.” I said, and he plucked my shades from beside me and perched them on my nose.

“I know.” He said. 

…

 

They were gone within the hour. We didn’t say goodbye.

I watched the four of them grow smaller and smaller across the foggy parking lot until their forms were obscured by the mist. It was a cold morning, one of the coldest yet.

“Dave,” Rose said, sliding closer and reaching for my limp hand. Her slim fingers eased themselves between mine. “I believe that you made the right choice.”

“I don’t believe that there was a right choice,” I answered.

Jake was on the roof as well, even though he wasn’t on the morning’s sniper rotation. Watching the group vanish with an ache in his heart, he stood next to us two.

“They’ll be alright, right Dave?” Jake asked cautiously. “They’re not in any danger they haven’t seen before?”

I wished that he was right about that.

“I know that they can handle themselves and make smart decisions.” I told him, pushing off the railing and out of Rose’s grip.

“Yeah,” I heard Jake tell Rose as I walked away. “Dirk can take care of himself. I’ll not worry about him now. He wouldn’t take well to me pining after him.”

I headed back downstairs. The day was young and there was still a mountain of things for me to do.

I threw myself into chores to take my mind off of Karkat and my cousin and Equius and Nepeta. Out back I found Tavros and Calliope tending to the goats.

“Hello,” I called, “What do we have here?”

Calliope snapped her face up at the sound of my voice.

“Dave,” she said, rising to stand beside Tavros on his braces, “They must have left by now, haven’t they?”

“Yes,” I said wearily, “They’re due back at the end of three days.”

“If it makes you feel better, I don’t think they’ll take that long.” She said. Tavros nodded enthusiastically beside her, limping over to join the conversation.

“Why do you say that?” he asked. There was a blue and brown knit cap pulled over his ears and his cheeks were red with the cold air. The hood of his jacket shifted and a tiny head appeared around his shoulder and nibbled at the yarn of his hat from where one of the baby goats was curled neatly against his back.

Calliope blinked at the both of us. “Either they’ll find who it is or not. I don’t think three days is what it will take to accomplish either finding them or being found themselves.” She knelt to pat the other twin newborn jumping around on wobbly legs.

That was what I was afraid of. Them being found first. Ambushed. 

Slaughtered before they even felt the eyes on their backs.

I pushed the idea away violently. In the corner, the lazy old brown dog signed and set his head down on his paws so that his loose jowls trailed along the dirt.

It looked comfortable, to just lie there and do nothing and watch the world carry on without taking part in it.

But the driving pulse of my life kept pounding relentlessly forward, always going on and on and on. Racing forward to its inevitable end.

This was going to be a long three days…

…

 

It was only two days later, two agonizing and thoughtlessly blended days where nothing stood out except for my own loneliness, that the alert from the roof went up. 

Jake tore past me first.

“What’s going on?” I called after him, already running after the flapping green coattails of his jacket.

“Vriska saw them first,” he panted. I kept pace with him as we ran to the front doors. “Said something looked wrong.” His voice trembled. I heard yelling behind me as word quickly spread through the Club, but I ignored them and threw open the doors and lunged out into the kill-lot.

Where were they?

The day was overcast, the winter sky white overhead and the air frigid. I could see them making for the gate through the gap in the car barrier, their shaped blurred together by distance. Jake made to unlock and open the gate.

My hand came down on is arm.

“Wait,” I said, forcing the words out past my desire to do exactly what I’d stopped him from doing. “We need to make sure it’s them.”

Jake nodded wordlessly, fidgeting restlessly from side to side as the second passed.

They were closer now. The shadows separated into two figures, one horribly misshapen and lurching as it stumbled.

I swallowed past the instinctive jolt of pure horror, scrambling for some explanation that didn’t end with infection.

I didn’t think I could stand seeing my friends as zombies. Anything but that.

Please. 

I could see my cousin’s face, drawn and pale but unmistakably alive beneath a layer of dirt. Dirk had a katana out and ready, but its end dragged at the ground in a way I’d never seen before. I realized what I was seeing as Equius leaned against Dirk’s shoulder, holding one leg off of the ground as he limped slowly forward. Nepeta was in the lead, her hands clenched into fists as she strode forward.

“By God above,” Jake swore, tearing at the chain while I stood there frozen, counting the small group of three again and again and finding that nothing had changed.

(Everything had changed.)

The gate clanged open as the chain fell to the ground with a rattle. Jake shoved the metal chain-link open and held it aside.

Nepeta visibly slumped with a painful type of relief, tension pouring off her frame as Dirk helped Equius inside.

“We need Jane and Feferi!” Roxy yelled, darting forward to take Equius’s other arm and help him to safety.

They moved past me and I stood at the mouth of the empty parking lot, hoping for a miracle. But Karkat never appeared. He wasn’t there.

Why wasn’t he here?

Please.

Please please please please please. Please…

Don’t do this to me.

“What happened?” My sharp voice cut through the panicked chatter like Aradia’s whip.

A broken silence fell. Not one of them would meet my eyes.

“Dirk.” I said.

He slowly raised his arm and let his sword slide back into its sheath on his back. He took his time with it, every agonizing second building and building.

I couldn’t breathe.

“We were set up.” He admitted. “They had a lone girl as bait. They left her tied to a pole and helpless. There were several zombies there, and they almost had her. I knew it might be a trap, but it was charge in or let the zombies get her.” he swallowed thickly, then continued.

By then everyone had gathered in the kill-lot. Besides Dirk’s voice not a sound existed. Everything was silence.

“We were lured in, baited, and attacked.” He said, a hard, furious scowl crossing his face. “The zombies weren’t even fucking real. It was just people in disguise. Equius took a gunshot to the leg before we knew what was happening. They had us.”

“Lock and key,” Nepeta spat on the ground. “Like fish in a barrel.”

“What happened then?” Jake asked.

“Karkat ordered us to stand down.” Dirk said, “Equius was already down and we could never have fought our way out of that. He was trying to save us.”

“What happened to him? How did you get away?” Eridan pushed his way to the front of the crowd, concern clouding his gaze.

“We didn’t. Get away, that is.” Dirk said grimly. “After we surrendered, Karkat demanded to know who they were, what they thought they were doing, the whole shebang. We were brought to their camp as hostages and interrogated. They wanted to know how many of us there were, where we had our camp, how many guns. We told them nothing.”

Dirk’s face was bruised, one eye black with more than dirt. I nodded at him, a jittery feeling blocking out everything but a rising dread.

“From what I saw, they’ve been systematically clearing blocks of the city, hunting for survivors and supplies. It won’t be long until they find the Club on their own.” He said.

The words sunk deep, twisting into the wound opening up in my heart.

“What happened to Karkat?” I asked, nearly choking back a break as my voice wavered.

“They let us go to bring back a message. Surrender to us all of your supplies and people, or die.” Nepeta said. Equius scowled, and I noticed he was missing a tooth under his split lip. Rage began to coil in my belly.

“Karkat, he kept mouthing off to them. He found where the line of be silent or get shot was and danced on it like a pro. He made their leader hate him instantly.” Dirk said. That sounded exactly like something Karkat would do. Draw attention to himself, protect the others by offering himself up.

It’s what I would do.

My mouth had never been so thin and hard. I could feel the pressure rising in my head as my teeth ground together.

(He might not come back.)

No.

Dirk looked over at where Calliope stood. “Caliborn. That’s your brother’s name right? Twins. I can see him in your face.”

She gasped, her hand covering her mouth. Tears welled up in her eyes as my worst-case scenario came to nightmarish life. I was falling.

“He’s still there with them.” He went on. “Caliborn said if we don’t give ourselves up in three days, he’ll kill Karkat himself and come find us.”

I was falling. I’d been falling for weeks, months, years even. I’d been falling all my goddamn life. And right then…

That’s when I finally hit the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry not sorry.  
> We are very near the ending of this fic and I'm so excited to see what happens next.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok let's talk.  
> With recent events in my life a lot of the fun of this fic was sucked out. I'm trying to overcome that by being more active. I'm currently writing the ending and fighting off the little voice in my head telling me to kill everyone. That's not going to happen, so don't worry to much. This story and it's faithful readers deserves better than that. I'm sorry for being so distant lately, but from now on I'll try to be more active besides just posting the new chapters.  
> And yes! The end is near and it will end with a bang.  
> So here's the new chapter. Let's do this!

Chapter eleven

Everything was silent for a moment as the core of my chest imploded on itself.

I’d felt pain before. I’d bled and I’d broken bones. I thought I knew pain, knew it like a brother, but now I knew that we had been nothing but strangers.

This pain I felt, radiating from the organ of my heart like it had physically broken inside me- This was pain at its purest, most undiluted form.

Everything I had worked for was over. The Club was done for. Karkat was gone.

A barrage of panicked voices broke out.

“What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean?” 

“What the ever-loving fuck did you walk into an ambush for?”

“Shut up!” Rose yelled out, raising her hands for everybody’s attention. “We need to discuss this in an orderly manner or we’ll get nowhere.”

They started to argue with each other, getting more and more frantic.

My mind was a sink hole. Thoughts crashed into each other like a car-crash in slow motion. 

The parking lot was still empty. The gate still wide-open.

Karkat was still gone.

I carefully pulled the gate shut and locked it again while they argued behind me. I couldn’t focus on the words they were saying. The gate swung shut with a finality, locking the idea of Karkat outside of the Club and outside of safety. 

There was only one thing I could hold onto.

I had to get him back.

Just fuck it all. I had to get him back.

“The way I see it,” I said out loud, raising my voice and pulling out my sword and slapping the flat of the blade against the fencing. A loud sound like a gong rang out. Eyes everywhere snapped to me as the babble stopped like I’d pulled the plug. “We only have two options here. Except that we really don’t. Not really.” I said. 

Everyone had gone silent. I met their eyes behind my shades.

“One,” I said, “We cut and run. Try to save our skins. That’s the fake option, the one that doesn’t exist.” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Let me explain.”

I moved through them until the Club was at my back, setting the stage.

“Three days to run.” I said, scoffing at the notion. “We can’t carry more than a weeks’ worth of food on our backs. We won’t have any shelter. Last night is the first time it’s frozen all winter but you can bet that it’s going to get colder. Once the snow sets in we’ll be sitting ducks.”

I had everyone’s attention. Nearly twenty scared and furious pairs of eyes stood starkly out of faces carved by grief and struggle. I couldn’t let them down.

i couldn't let Karkat down. He needed me to convince them. 

“But to really drive my point home and say what a hilarious and suicidal idea running is, I don’t think we can outrun them. Not all of us. We’d be caught if we try to head south. You really don’t think they’ll be expecting us to pull a move like that?”

I spoke with my hands, with my whole body. I’d never been in the spotlight like this before, attention meant a note left folded on my bed, a call to strife. I fought past that. I had to convince them.

“And we might as well shoot ourselves in the head right here and now and save Caliborn the trouble than to try running north.”

I paused, feeling the mood of the crowd shifting.

“And that’s to say nothing of leaving Karkat to die.” I said, dropping the pain I felt into my voice. I did not cry. I had to stay focused, but it was a close thing.

“So what do we do?” Rose called out from the side. She was smart enough to see where I was headed and back me up.

I pulled myself together. I was Dave Strider. I was unwavering.

“We refuse his offer.” I said. “We rescue Karkat. We break this cult so that it isn’t a danger to us or anyone else ever again. This Caliborn gave us three days. That means he’ll be expecting us in three days’ time.”

“What happens when the time runs out?” Aradia asked.

“It’s not going to run out.” I said, surprising her and everyone else. “In three days this will be over. If we attack tomorrow night we have the element of surprise.”

“You want us to attack?!” Kanaya was dismayed.

“It’s the only viable action besides rolling over and letting them kill us.” I pointed out, “And I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to give up. I’m willing to fight. Not just not to die, but for this. The Club. The life that we’ve made here.”

Karkat.

“I’m not going to watch idly as Caliborn burns everything we’ve worked for to the ground.” I finished, holding my sword up in challenge. The sea of hard faces were lifted up, anger flashing between them. I saw nods and raised arms, voices rising in agreement and determination. I had them.

“Is anyone with me?” I yelled, and whoops of agreement rang out, “Are we ready to go save Karkat and win our freedom?”

We were angry. We were righteous. We were ready and willing to throw down.

Karkat, I thought. I wish you could see me now.

“Let’s do this.” I said, and the crowd roared back at me, the sun setting bloody over the Club at my back.

…

 

I didn’t sleep that night. How could I, with Karkat gone and a battle on the horizon?

I was full of too many things to focus on, and I threw myself into planning the attack.

Me, Dirk, Rose, Calliope, Eridan, and Terezi formed the war party. It was our job to plan everything out, to make sure we knew what we were getting into before we ever fired a shot.

“This is where they’ve set up camp,” Dirk said, circling where they were on a map. “There’s good roof cover here, here, and here.” He marked the areas with red pen.

Rose took a purple pen and inked out areas to strike from, as well as where guards might be posted.

For a second, the reality of planning out how to best attack humans, kill them if needed, rocked me back on my feet. I wasn’t a murderer, and this was all to premeditated to justify anything but cold-blooded assault. This was to be an intentional attack. Blood would be spilled.

I might have to kill someone.

I didn’t know if I could do that.

“Calliope,” I asked, “Are you alright with this? Since we’ve heard your input, you can leave if you’d like.”

She looked up at me, and when she spoke her voice was cold and certain. 

“The world is not going to miss my twin,” she said, “And neither am I. He more than deserves what’s coming to him.”

Her eyes cut to the ground as she rubbed where the brand had burned her. “If I had been strong enough to kill him myself none of this would have happened. This is as much my fault as it is his.”

“This is not your doing,” Rose said gently, “I know how hard it can be. If you don’t want to listen to us planning how best to kill your brother, we’ll understand.”

“I know,” Calliope said, and her eyes glittered. “But I want to hear. Caliborn is an evil, twisted individual. We will save many by removing him and destroying his followers.”

“That’s the plan,” I told her, “We aim for him and his core followers. If most of his group is survivors are there out of fear they’re just as much a prisoner as Karkat is. If we cut the head off the snake- They’ll crumble.”

“And he is the head of the snake,” Dirk said, “If we take out him and his posse we’ll win. With no leaders I don’t think they’ll fight us. Once the fight breaks out I won’t be surprised if a lot of them run off. Not one of them outside of his close followers will be ready to die for him.”

“Unless one of them picks up a gun and tries to shoot one of us, I want them left alone.” I said, “They’re not our enemies.”

“What about G-” Eridan started, but I quickly cut him off.

“I’ll tell everyone about that at the meeting.” I said firmly. “They need to know, but we can’t change our plan now. Not with Karkat’s life on the line.”

Terezi sank the end of her sword cane through the table, pinning the map in place. Her sword pierced right through the red circle around their camp.

“We strike quick and hard.” She said, her face equal parts furious and devious. “I don’t have any problems killing these people for what they’ve done. They’ve broken the law. They’ve taken one of our own, shot Equius, beaten Dirk, and threatened us all. When we attack, it will be with justice.”

“Yeah, with justice. And now we can’t see the damn map.” Eridan sighed.

“Does everyone understand the plan?” I asked, “Are we ready to do this?”

“We are,” they said as one.

“Good,” I said, my pulse pounding in my throat. Pain still radiated outward from my heart with every beat. “Then we’re fucking doing this.”

…

“How is he?” I asked, slipping under the curtains of where Feferi and Jane had set up our medical bay.

Equius was in a plain pod that was nothing more than a mattress and blanket. His eyes were open and his face was pale and sweaty.

Jane finished wrapping his leg in bandages. I could see the thick padding above his knee where the shot hit him. Feferi gave him a glass of water and some pills to take, which he turned down.

“Others might need those soon.” He said.

“And you need them now,” Feferi scolded, holding them out to him again. “You’re dead on your feet from blood loss and exhaustion.”

She continued to fuss at him until he swallowed them obediently. Jane came over and whispered in my ear.

“The bullet missed his knee, but the bone took damage. He’s lost a lot of blood and we don’t have a way to get the splinters out. I’m not sure if it will heal right or not.”

I put that thought aside. The future could wait. For once I was entirely caught in the present. 

“How is he right now?” I asked.

“Weak,” Jane whispered, “Hurting and in pain. He lost a tooth and his nose is broken too. He might have a concussion, but we’re not sure.”

“I do not have a concussion Jane.” Equius said, rising up to a sitting position. “I said my head is clear.”

“You have a concussion until I say you don’t mister,” Jane sassed, wheeling on him with a wooden spoon. “Now lay down and get some sleep.”

“Damn girl,” I said, “Remind me never to get sick.”

She smiled, then frowned. “We might have a lot more gunshot injuries to worry about than his soon.”

“They let us go to deliver their terms,” Equius said, his breathing deep and painful. “But they never meant for us to make it back.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. 

Those wide shoulders shrugged, and he lay back in the cot. “I couldn’t walk,” he said. “I couldn’t fight. Dirk couldn’t fight because he was trying to carry me. I was laying down a trail of fresh blood behind me and all the zombies in the city had converged near their camp, drawn there by the light and noise.”

He shuddered. “We shouldn’t have made it back.”

I could picture the scene in my mind, and a slow burn began to smolder in my gut.

“How did you?” I asked.

“Your cousin and Nepeta fought our way out. Don’t ask me how they did it; I wasn’t fully conscious at the time and what I did see I’m not sure is real.” He said, his eyes beginning to drift closed. “But I remember Caliborn watching as he threw us outside to the horde. He was laughing.”

My skin was crawling and hairs raised at the back of my neck.

Equius drifted to sleep on whatever pills Feferi had given him.

“He’ll be alright, won’t he?” I asked, and our two healers looked at each other uneasily.

“There’s always the risk of infection setting in.” Jane said.

“He’s already feverish,” Feferi set a damp rag across his forehead, brushing back the hair there. Sweat glistened on his brow. “I pray we got to him in time.”

“He can fight this,” I said. “He’s strong.”

“Yes,” Feferi said, “And we will help him fight this.”

“That’s all I can ask of you.” I said, thanking them again before walking away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot happened in this chapter and that's good. The plot is advancing...


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the next chapter! We're so close to the end I can taste the emotional pain from here!  
> Warning! This is the last chill chapter. After this there will be violence and blood and all that good stuff.

Chapter twelve 

I went to find Dirk.

I went to check his pod first; I’d ordered him to get some rest. We had a fight ahead of us and as tired as I knew he was I couldn’t give up on having him at my side.

When I was near, I paused. The curtains to his pod were drawn but I could hear noises coming from beyond the soft gray fabric.

Rustling. A gentle sigh followed by a hungry gasp of breath.

A pang shot through my battered heart and I nearly turned and left them alone. But time was running out and life could be cruel.

I loudly cleared my throat. “When I gave you the rest of the day off I meant for you to be getting some sleep, not snogging your boyfriend.”

“Bloody hell.” I heard the roughened angry whisper, followed by what sounded like a growl.

I waited a minute for Jake to sneak out the other side of the pod before I asked if I could talk.

“I’m going to fucking kill you Dave.” Dirk said instead of greeting me.

“You can kill me after the battle,” I said, sinking onto the end of his bed. His eyes were tired slits and his clothing impeccably straight, but I could tell he was pissed at me. He always carried his anger in his jaw and in his eyes.

“Equius told me what you did,” I said. He knew what I meant at once.

“It wasn’t just me,” He said immediately. “Without Nepeta we all would have died. She’s just as responsible as me. Why don’t you go bother her with your thanks?”

“It was the two of you, I know. I’ll go thank Nepeta later,” I said, “I’m sorry to do this to you. I know you went through hell out there, but I have to ask you something.”

He passed his hand over his face and grunted, like something half- thought of that slipped out without meaning. A mistake. “It wasn’t like the hell you went through.”

For a second I thought I’d misheard him. Static. Nothing more.

“What?”

“Dave,” he said, and he tried to say his thoughts out-loud to me. “It didn’t take us long to put it together.”

“Put what together?” My voice was a warning. An irrational part of me was yelling at me to run, to get away. A shiver fought its way up my spine, the memory of blood spraying vivid behind my eyelids. Red. 

“Jesus Dave,” he groaned, throwing up an elbow to cover his eyes. “Do you want me to spell it out for you?”

“I want you to stop.” I said, the edge creeping closer. I was cold as ice. Inside, I was growing smaller. Lessening somehow. I was losing parts of myself again.

“Rose made us promise not to say anything,” He said, still not looking at me. “She said we couldn’t push you. That you’d talk when you were ready.”

“Dirk. Shut up.” I said. My hands started shaking.

“I will if you truly ask me to,” he said, and his arm fell away to reveal his earnest, burning eyes. “Dave, I’m sorry for this. I am so goddamn sorry that we couldn’t save you from your brother. We knew, but we couldn’t do anything about it. That was the whole reason our mom invited you two down to visit us for the holidays. She was planning to-”

“Stop, please.” I said. I didn’t mean for it to sound like I was begging, but the word slipped out.

I guessed we were both making mistakes today. Bro would be ashamed. 

I was coming apart. I was shaking. I was nothing nothing nothing.

Gone.

“Oh fuck,” Dirk said, and he shot upright, sounding panicked. “Dave?”

He sounded like he was on the other side of a huge room. My ears were filled with numbness and silence. I couldn’t breathe. 

I had been holding in everything I’d been feeling. Now that jar of emotions was leaking and I didn’t know what to do.

For a second, I missed Karkat so much it was like I was dying. Like he was the air I needed to live.

But I couldn’t afford to fall apart, not now and not ever, so I gritted my teeth and gasped in a breath and held it until it hurt, then slowly let it out.

“Give me a minute,” I choked out, “I swear if you touch me I’ll hit you.”

The hand he’d been hesitantly reaching towards me hit the mattress. “Shit Dave, I’m sorry. I’ll deserve it of you hit me.”

“No you won’t.” I said, reigning in my self-control until the quivering left me. I was done with being afraid. Karkat taught me that. It was time everything was out on the table between us. No more secrets.

“Fuck Dave, I didn’t mean to-”

I cut him off. “I said it’s alright.” I bit back the venom in my voice. My anger wasn’t at him. “It’s alright.” I repeated. “You can say it. It’s time. You can say it.” 

“I don’t know what to say.” Dirk admitted, blinking like his face had frozen. His eyes were sticky. “Other then I’m glad he’s dead.”

My heart skipped a beat. I swallowed painfully. “Me too,” I whispered, my eyes painfully dry beneath my shades. I was a desert. I was frozen.

A shared moment passed between us. I felt better now that the words I thought I’d never say had left my mouth. A weight was lifted. One less thing to carry on my back.

“Caliborn’s a son of a bitch,” Dirk said, “And I’ll kill him for you to get Karkat back.”

“That’s not what I was going to ask you to do.”

“Wasn’t it?”

I rubbed at my dry eyes, scrubbed at them until I saw nothing but spots of black.

“No.” I decided. “Not like that.”

“Then like how?” he asked.

“You were always better than me,” I said, “He always adored you. After the virus hit I put a sword in your hand and you just knew what to do with it. It was as easy as breathing for you. You always had this core to you that he respected. I was always too soft for him.”

Today was a weird day. I had never expected to have some kind of heart-to-heart with Dirk, but right now I was broken and shivering and needed whatever comfort I could get.

“I think you’re better than me with a sword,” Dirk said, partly to protect me. “And better at leading, at surviving. We’d all be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

“No, we’d all be dead if it wasn’t for him.” I said, “He’s the one who trained me to do all the things I can do.”

And there it was, the fatal truth.

How could I hate the man who had ensured that I would survive? Everything he ever did- every cut, every hit, every broken bone and hidden abuse let me know how the world really was.

And when it fell to shit I was left standing with the skill to save my cousins and everyone else in the Club.

“Does Karkat know?” Dirk asked gently.

“He knows everything,” I said, and now I was pissed. Dammit.

Damn him for not letting me hate him in peace. “Listen, I don’t give a fuck about how everyone sees me. This is what I was going to ask you.”

“What is it?” His voice was wary. Maybe he could sense the steel in me beginning to bend under the pressure.

“Get them out of there.” I ordered, “If it comes down to the line, please don’t let me fuck everything up. Leave me to fucking die if that’s what it takes. If things go south and we need to abandon the Club, you need to step the fuck up.”

I could never be sure of myself. I was living as a broken person. I had learned to never trust myself.

I was still learning how to move on.

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” Dirk said slowly, “I actually believe in this plan of ours.”

“Like hell you do,” I said.

“Okay, no. I think we’re outnumbered and out-gunned and playing a game that we don’t know the stakes of.” Dirk said.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Yes,” he said, “Because they don’t know what’s coming for them.”

I smiled for the first time since Karkat had left.

“I’ll leave you be then,” I said, “And I meant it when I said you needed to sleep. I need both of you and Jake well-rested for tomorrow.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Dave,” he said sweetly, “Get the fuck out.”

I let him chase me away, yelling “Don’t be late to the meeting!” behind me.

…

The sun was rising to reveal a thin layer of frost over the skin of the Club. White and glittering and deadly, a reminder of the bad weather to come. At the first touch of the sun it vanished like smoke in the air, but its message had been clear.

The cold was here.

Inside the Club it was still warm and smoky and everyone had gathered for the pre-attack meeting. I was in charge of most of the speaking. Rose was going to pay for that.

“Alright everybody, shut the hell up.” I said, climbing onto of a shelving unit to get a view of the floor. Everyone was present, even Equius, looking vaguely spaced-out from whatever drugs Jane had him on.   
“As you all know, tonight we’re attacking a murder-cult that’s holding Karkat hostage. As terrible as that sounds, when faced with the terms of surrender they’ve given us it’s the only option left. Does everyone understand so far?”

No one questioned me, so I continued. “Everyone who is going to fight should have been given teams and assignments by now. If you have any questions about these speak now.”

No questions rang forth. It was weird to be up on the railing like this. I could see the tops of everyone’s messy hair from up here. Vertigo made my insides lurch, a spasm of memory of other high places taking over for a second. 

“Okay, so we’re all on the same page.” I said, shoving the memory down deep and ignoring it. “There’s just one last thing to talk about then. I’m sorry to bring this up so late, but there was a bit of a row at the war-meeting earlier about it. I decided to say fuck it and let everyone know what’s up.”

“Dave, just shut the fuck up and spit it out.” Sollux called out from the back.

I casually flipped him off as I spoke. “Karkat isn’t the only person there that we’re trying to rescue. There’s someone else.”

An ocean of whispering traveled across the floor.

“Most of you should know him. Karkat told me he was probably dead, that Gamzee had been killed during a run-in with this same cult over eight months ago, but apparently he’s alive and kicking.”

A second of chaotic chatter took over the room. From my original eight I saw blank stares. They had never known this guy. But from those who had known Gamzee, had fought alongside him, had mourned his death- there was uproar. 

I didn’t blame them.

“What?”

“Oh my God!”

“Are you shitting us?”

Everyone except people from the war council were shocked and stunned. From them, I could see wariness at the upcoming conversation. My stomach twisted sickly and I swallowed my nausea. 

“Gamzee’s alive?” Kanaya asked, her collected voice breaking over the rest of the vocal rabble.

“It appears so.” I said, and quiet fell again. “He was there when our scouting team was captured.”

“Is he a prisoner too?” Tavros asked, balancing haphazardly on Terezi’s shoulder. 

I bit my lip, but I couldn’t lie about this. “No. He’s not a prisoner.”

The sea of stunned faces began to swirl together and I blinked behind my shades until they came into focus again. I went on.

“Before anyone gets too happy about the fact that he’s not dead, he’s acting happily as Caliborn’s second in command.” I said. Disbelief held their tongues for a second. 

“No fucking way,” Vriska protested, “That dense idiot couldn’t tell which end of a gun was the barrel to save his life.”

“Don’t believe me?” I challenged, “Ask Equius who it was that shot him in the leg.”

Equius limped forward on a home-made crutch, his leg heavily bandaged and hurting.

“It’s true,” He said, “Gamzee is living with Caliborn and following his orders.”

“Are you sure it was him?” Aradia asked, laying a hand on Sollux’s shoulder. They all wanted to not believe this was happening.

“Beyond any doubt.” Equius said, raising his chin. The bruising on his face looked much darker in this lighting that it did in the hospital corner. “The rest of the team recognized him as well.”

“Then why did he shoot you?” Tavros sounded confused, like he couldn’t understand. “He was your friend?”

“From what Karkat told me,” I answered, “Gamzee was killed when they ran him down with a truck. Based off that description I’m betting he’s a brainwashed amnesiac in need of a healthy dose of who the fuck he really is, because right now he’s completely hiveshit maggots.”

There was no response from the crowd. They were in total shock. I pressed harder.

“I am not joking,” I said, “Right fucking now Gamzee is not one of us. He will not recognize you if you knew him before, and he will try to kill you. He is dangerous and unpredictable and I’m ordering everyone to watch their backs because he wants nothing more than to break your bones and cut you into tiny pieces to feed to the zombies.”

“If he’s a lost cause why the fuck do you want to save him?” Vriska spat the words up at me, “From what you’ve said just now, trying to help him will only earn us a bullet in the back. We don’t need some brain-damaged smuck complicating things and ruining everything.”

I could see Eridan nodding along with her and narrowed my eyes at him.

“Because,” I said, “I know something that none of you are thinking about. Karkat is still there, with Gamzee nearby. Do you really think he won’t try to break through to his old friend? If there’s anyone out there that can snatch the crazy out of Gamzee it’s Karkat.”

“So he might not be a bad guy?” The hope in Tavros’s voice was killing me.

“We can’t assume that,” I said gently, “Until proven otherwise we have to think of him as a threat. I want to save him, but that might just be wishful thinking on my part. Our aim is to capture him first, if at all possible. If not… then don’t die to prove me right.”

Tavros looked away.

“Am I understood?” I asked, and nearly twenty upturned faces nodded back at me, looking hard and determined. Terezi was waving her sword/cane in the air like a maniac.

“We leave at noon,” I said, raising a fist in the air to stir them on, “Let’s fucking do this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's only 15 chapters to this story. It's amazing how long this fic has gone on. I almost wish I had waited until after I had finished it to condense some things and cut out all of the unnecessary parts. Note to self- Wait next time and get it right!


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning!  
> This contains blood/violence/blah blah blah.  
> It's a zombie AU you all know what that means. Emotional pain is to be expected at this point. There is implied sexual assault, so if that bothers you sorry.  
> OMG I'm so happy with how this turned out, so here's chapter 13!

Chapter thirteen.

We left when the sun was at its peak because no way was I fucking around in darkness with this shit. It would be sunset by the time we were in place and the movement of the sun turning in the sky above me made my teeth clench.

Equius met with me right before I locked the gate behind us.

“Give them hell for me,” he asked, spitting onto the ground in displeasure.

There were only four people not participating in the upcoming battle. Equius, Tavros, Feferi, and Jane would stay behind to defend the Club. I wasn't sure how I felt about that yet.

“If we don’t come back,” I asked, “Give them hell for me.”

He smiled. “Consider it done,” he said, and just like that we were on equal footing. I wasn’t the leader, he wasn’t the wounded fighter. We were both just people ready to defend our loved ones to the death.

(Please don’t let me get anyone killed.)

Then we were gone, the protective walls of the Club growing smaller and smaller behind us.

I had memorized the map Dirk made, and we went slowly and carefully through the ruined city. They might have scouts or raiding parties about the place and I wasn’t going to risk everything on a freak encounter.

All of the madness I’d been dealing with boiled down into a single thought.

Karkat, I’m coming for you.

Behind me the group was mostly silent. Some were fiddling with weapons, tight with anticipation and sick with nerves.

Calliope was endlessly spinning the chamber of her revolver, the same one she was brought in with but fully loaded now. Her thumb pressed rounds out and moved them under her fingers, playing with the cool steel before fitting the bullet back in place. She caught me looking at her and snapped the last round into the chamber and shot me a hard look.

“This one,” she said, holding up a single shot between two fingers, “I’m saving for him.”

I didn’t doubt her. She had come a long way from the scared girl hiding under an overpass.

I could see smoke in the distance from campfires they weren’t trying to hide. I wiped dust off of my shades and squinted at the wisps of black against the blue. We were getting close.

“Split up,” I whispered, “Everyone into position. Once you’re on the roofs wait for my signal. Snipers, don’t stop shooting until its over. Everyone else, follow me.”

Like smoke themselves my band of ghosts vanished into the surrounding buildings. I waited until they would be ready and in position before taking my remaining fighters forward.

By now I could hear them. People. Talking and yelling and cursing mingling with moaning from the undead surrounding their camp. Five zombies stood shambling at the end of the street. We took them out silently without stopping.

I turned the last corner and it was like I was suddenly back before the end of the world. The town square was packed with people and fire and activities and life until it hurt my senses to take it all in.

This moment was so much like one before. Me stepping out into hostile territory to meet Karkat. Same concept, but hopefully with a different outcome. I was not here to make friends. I could see every single gun that swung up to meet me.

Or not. I couldn’t see any guns. It was less than I’d imagined. Didn't these people at least have guards assigned for their protection?

Everyone was unarmed and thin and ragged and desperate. The last dregs of humanity swirled together in a rotting stew. Some of the people here were so threadbare starving that I might have mistaken their ashy skin for a zombie if we met under different circumstances. They didn’t seem to care about us and let us pass through them with nothing but looks of wary interest and fear.

I kept silent as I led my team through the sea of strangers and hastily constructed hovels. These were the outsiders, the nobodies. Caliborn and his crew would be at the center of this mess, so that was where I was headed.

We walked through them like ghosts. We should have been challenged by now. Someone should have noticed us.

With a growing sense of dread I caught the arm of a passing woman with a shaved head.

“Do you know where Caliborn is?” I asked.

She shrugged out of my grip, her scalp peeling, dead-eyed and hopeless, and stumbled on without a word in her gray cloths. 

“What the fuck?” Sollux whispered to me, “What is this place?”

“Keep together,” I said, raising my voice so everyone could hear. “Watch out for a trap.”

Calliope watched the people with sad eyes. “It’s like nothing’s changed.” She said. My skin crawled and a shudder worked its way up my spine.

“Where is your brother?” I asked, and she took the lead as she cut through the tangle of human filth.

There, at the center on a raised dais where once a garden had stood, was a large green tent casting its shadow over the dead flowers. There was the same spiraling mark that was burned into Calliope’s face on the green fabric of the door, drawn with what I recognized as dried blood. A crowd of tougher, meaner looking people guarded the pavilion, and these men were all armed.

“Who the ever-loving fuck are you?” A shotgun was leveled at my gut, held by a man who was no more than a sneering face.

“Dave,” I said, faking a smile like nothing about this situation was wrong. “Your leader invited us.”

The sneer paused, the handful of other guards with him faltering at my words.

“Put your hands up!” One of them yelled, raising a machete at us threateningly.

“No,” I said coldly, “We were invited here. Where's your leader?”

That stunned them.

“You bastard,” Sneering Man said, pumping the shotgun until it clicked, “What do you mean you were invited?”

Danger flashed its way across the hairs at the back of my neck. I was surrounded by strangers with guns.

“We were given three days to surrender,” I said, motioning to the group behind me. “We’re a bit early, but we’re here and ready to work something out.”

A light lit behind his colorless eyes. “You’re that fucking group, aren’t you? The one we had some fun with a few days ago?” he laughed, and the others laughed with him. “You poor bastards, you actually came?!”

More cruel laughter.

“Well, this will just tickle the clown to death,” the man grunted, “Maybe he’ll choke on his own spit.” He nodded to himself, still chuckling. “Alright you sorry bunch of motherfuckers, anyone raises a gun we’ll kill you all. Understand?”

“Yes,” I answered, and my skin was crawling with fear. We were in the lion’s den. We had no way out that didn’t end in blood.

“Go get the boss,” Someone ordered, shoving a younger guy forward so hard he stumbled and ripped open his knee of the hard ground. They laughed again as he picked himself up and dashed over to the tent.

I didn’t like the way we were being looked at. Like fresh meat. Rose shuddered as a big man with a loose gut lurched close enough to her to let out a sour belch across her face. She turned away, shaking and doing nothing but grabbing Kanaya’s hand tight enough I could see her knuckles drain white.

“Pretty thing like you,” he slurred at her, scratching at the half-formed dirty beard across his lower face. “What you doin’ with outa man at your side? Come here, sweet girl.” He groped at her body and my cousin froze and let go of her girlfriend’s hand. Kanaya trembled, but said nothing as Rose carefully lifted the man’s hand from her breast and stepped back.

He laughed a full bellied bark of laughter and stepped even closer. “If you were a smart girlie,” he warned, “You’d be nicer to me.”

The raw fear in my cousin’s eyes nearly broke me. Dirk stepped up and blocked him with his body. He was taller than the man and his shoulders were hard cut and defined. Intimidating. Every line of him promised violence. 

“That,” he said, the crossed swords at his back flashing in the light, “Is my sister.”

If I needed any other reason to justify our actions here, it was the look on Rose’s face. Hatred, hot and true and seething, flared through me.

The door of the tent flapped open before the offender could do anything more than stare stupidly up at Dirk.

“Well, why the fuck didn’t you tell me we had company?” A nasally, whining voice grated against my ears as the door flapped open to reveal the skeleton of a teen.

He had the same pale skin and hair as Calliope, and his legs were longer and lanky. He stood straight as a beanpole and just as wide, but there was something off about his thin frame that made him seem larger than he was.

He moved like he owned the air around him, an AK held carelessly in one hand. The first thing he noticed about us was his sister standing quietly at my side, her eyes on the ground and her hands clenched.

“You,” he said, lurching forward with a quickness down the steps of the dais, “I knew that you would be back, you scheming bitch.”

Calliope said nothing. She shrunk into her own body under his gaze, growing smaller. Fearful. 

“Look at me when I am talking to you!” Caliborn ordered, and her eyes snapped back to him.

“Caliborn,” She murmured softly, lowering herself into a small bow. “It’s been-”

“I didn’t say you could talk,” Her twin interrupted her, shaking his head in a cold amusement. “It looks like you’ve forgotten your manners.” He tutted, shaking a finger at her. “That just won’t do. I’ll have to teach you them all over again, won’t I?”

She knew better than to argue. “Yes,” she gasped out, lowering herself even more. “You will have to teach me again.”

The sick satisfied look on his gaunt face made several things click together in my head and I nearly pulled out my gun and shot him right then and there. I had never felt such anger in my life. Not a single flicker of it showed on my face. I had never been so cold.

“Can you not count to three? I said three days.” Caliborn asked, “Tell me, which one of you stupid fucks should I hold responsible for this?”

It was my turn.

“I am,” I said, stepping forward. Time sharpened around me, I was electric and buzzing.

“I guess I’ll have to thank you for returning my whore of a sister,” He said, stepping forward to shake my hand. His skin was clammy and cold, but his grip was like a steel trap. “I hope you’re not expecting any favors out of it though,” he said, and I could feel the bones in my hand compressing together painfully, grating and shifting. “She’s not worth the blood she would spill.”

I nodded along with him, feeling sick, and he let my hand go and squinted at my shades, then at the group behind me.

“Is this all of you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where’s that other one?” he asked at once, “The one the clown shot?”

Gamzee. The clown. Danger rattled around in my veins.

“He never made it back.” I said. My heart was beginning to pound.

Caliborn nodded carelessly, the AK swinging from a strap across his back.

“No matter,” he said, smiling like we were the punchline of a joke only he understood. 

“You already have one of us,” I said, steeling myself for “I want to see him before we go any further.”

“Do you now?” he asked, and I wondered if I’d gone too far.

“We kept up our end of the deal,” I said, hiding my desperation. I was running on autopilot. I was running on borrowed time.

“And I am not a liar,” Caliborn said, raising his voice. The men around him laughed again. “Bring him out.”

Dread shot through me. I wasn’t sure how I knew, but something had gone wrong. I had fucked up.

When they brought Karkat out I thought that he was dead.

They had him strung up by the wrists to a wooden pole and rolled him out on a wheeled cart. His head hung loose and limp and bloody, his body displayed on the makeshift pole like a spectacle. Strung up and beaten. Struck while helpless. I couldn't breathe. 

“What the hell is this?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice even. Behind me, I heard several shocked gasps form the group and Nepeta’s hissed cursing.

Karkat’s head slowly lifted, and everything fell into place.

Karkat was still alive.

I could see him. He was so close.

Blood was rushing through my system, adrenaline making everything more vivid. More painful. My heart beat like it was trying to kill me, every hurting pump pushing congealed blood through veins like ice.

Caliborn was a dead man.

Right before I could lift my hand, the signal to attack, and pray that my snipers could see us here, Caliborn spoke.

“This?” he said, walking over to where Karkat was tied. A lanky teen stood beside the pole with a club in hand. A rat’s nest of wild, shaggy hair hovered around his scarred face. “This is my insurance.” Caliborn said, nearly purring with satisfaction.

Something was very wrong here.

“Dave…” Rose whispered to me, her voice tight and cautious.

“I know,” I whispered back.

I didn't know. I didn't know anything at all except for the fact that Karkat was alive and the one who did this to him was standing unhurt right in front of me wearing a shit-eating grin.

“I’m not happy to be taken as a fool, Dave.” Caliborn sneered. “I know my twin would never agree to return to me under her own power. She’s too much of a coward to do anything herself, so I’m betting it’s you Dave. What did she tell you? That I’m a monster? It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the one who wants to kill me.”

“Sly seductress, whispering her lies and follies. Motherfuckin hurts a brother’s soul.” The other teen said, his eyes staring right at Calliope, uncomfortably vacant and vigilant all at the same time.

“Oh, go suck my dick, clown.” Caliborn waved the teen off. “No one wants to hear your bullshit right now.” He turned back to me, “Go on. What did she say about me?”

“Nothing that wasn’t true.” I said, quiet rage reaching up my throat to choke my voice. Gamzee stood blinking silently beside the pole.

I was past caring. Caliborn knew. They all knew, and I was done being afraid.

“Ahhhh,” Caliborn said, “So there we have it.” He took out a knife and stepped behind Karkat, pressing the blade to his throat.

I had really, really fucked up.

“Now listen closely,” Caliborn said, the sharp edge of the knife digging into the soft hollow of Karkat’s throat. “This is game over. I know you and your people wouldn’t have walked into suicide under loyalty alone, so I’m guessing that you love this sorry freak street thug I have here.” The knife pressed deeper, deep enough that fresh blood welled up from the cut and soaked into the collar of his shirt.

“Stop,” I said. My eyes were locked onto the knife at his throat. No. “You have this all wrong.”

With Caliborn so close to Karkat I couldn’t risk any of us opening fire. It was too dangerous. I scrambled for a new plan.

“I don’t give a single solitary fuck about who you have strung up.” I said, “I can’t even remember what the fuck his name even is.”

Karkat’s eyes were open slits, his nostrils flared. The knife gently drew blood from his neck and he couldn’t nod at me, but I knew his agreement from across the dais. I could read it in his painful expression, beneath the hurt and the fear. We had to fool him.

“Is that so?” Caliborn asked, and this time he sounded a little unsure of himself. He didn’t know the rules of the game we were playing either. Cat and mouse. 

Looking into his gaunt face, I thought this was more snake and mouse.

I refused to be the mouse.

“He’s no one to me,” I said, and a small piece of my soul chipped off at the lie.

“Then tell me this,” Caliborn asked, “If you’re not here to attack, why the fuck are you here? I’m sure my sister didn’t tell you any flattery, so cut the bullshit. Why are you here?”

Caliborn couldn't get a read on me. I was an enigma. I was hidden behind my shades and my swords and I would give him nothing.

“To join you,” The words jumped to my tongue before I could think about their meaning. I just had to trust that everyone behind me would roll with it.

Caliborn’s eyes narrowed. “Think you’re clever, don’t you?” he said, and he took the knife away from Karkat’s throat. I could breathe again. Karkat was glaring pure hate at the man, so concentrated and hot I'm surprised the look alone didn't make him spontaneously combust. 

He pulled out a smaller gun, a revolver like his sister’s, and aimed it dead at me. I was much happier with this arrangement. I'd do anything to not have that gun pointed at anyone else. This was my burden to bear. I had to protect everyone. Then he smiled and shifted the barrel until it rested against Karkat’s temple with the look of a man with nothing to lose.

“I know about all your snipers.” He said, his eyes cold and cruel, “Call them off or I’ll kill him right now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mwahahahahahahahaha
> 
>  
> 
> Gosh I love a good cliffhanger.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh My goodness sorry this is so late. I was called in to late night shift at work unexpectedly.  
> Anyway HERE IT IS!  
> THE NEW CHAPTER!  
> WE'RE DOING THIS!  
> Prepare your tear ducts. Emotional pain dead ahead.

Chapter fourteen.

For a moment I couldn’t think past the sight of the gun to Karkat’s head. Unnatural, hyper-realist. Wrong. Gunmetal and blood. Dark skin and red eyes that pleaded with me to forget about him, to run.

I couldn’t do that.

(He’s bluffing.)

“I don’t have any snipers,” I said, fighting nonchalance. “I told you, this is all we are.”

Caliborn cocked back the hammer with a thumb. “Last chance.” He warned, sadistically pleased with himself. He was enjoying every minute of this. 

“Kill him then,” I said, hating myself, hating him, hating absolutely everything about this backwards fucked up situation we were in, because Karkat and my own heart were not worth the death of everyone else I had to protect. I knew that fact to the core of my bones, but the words tore my mouth sore on their exit. “I don’t have any goddamned snipers.” I said, my voice low and furious.

“Maybe you don’t,” Caliborn shrugged and dropped the gun, smiling like this was all some sort of misunderstanding. “But I know you care about this sorry piece of shit I’ve got here,” He said, and he grabbed Karkat’s ear and violently twisted his head to the side, the barrel of the gun coming up again.

Karkat cringed away as far as the ropes would let him but it wasn’t enough to let him escape the shot.

Caliborn neatly put a bullet through the center of Karkat’s ear, the hole that remained pouring blood down his neck and side. His red eyes were wide and furious, unfocused and blurry with tears.

I wasn’t aware that I’d drawn my sword until Rose’s arm encircled my wrist with a vice-like grip. Caliborn grinned like a madman, Karkat hanging upright by his wrists, beaten and bloody. But not defeated.

Karkat spat a mouthful of blood across Caliborn’s grinning face. “Is that the best you can do, you shit-eating fucking tragedy? You monumental lack-witted moronic fuckup, is that really the best that you can fucking do? Fucking shoot me through the ear? I’ll slit your fucking throat.” He challenged, a shit-eating grin on his bloody face. He strained against his restraints, his teeth bared.

Caliborn shook the gun at him like he was a naughty dog, then struck him across the face with it.

“By God you’re a glutton for punishment, you loudmouthed fuck. I will not be mocked by the likes of you,” he said, calmly wiping the blood and spit off of his face. His eyes shot to where I’d drawn my sword, Rose’s hand hard against my arm.

That told him everything he needed to know.

“Checkmate,” he said, laughing. “I got you now.”

Behind me Dirk silently drew his swords. Terezi swung her cane sword forward, and Roxy raised a handgun. They were all waiting for me to say the magic words.

I was on a tightrope over a precipice I could not see the bottom of.

I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him so much that my arm trembled with the need to cut him, to watch him bleed.

“Is this really how you want this to end?” Caliborn asked, “One move from any of you and the freak dies. Clown, see that it happens.” Caliborn ordered.

Gamzee hadn’t moved once thorough the whole encounter, a silent watchman, but now his brow furrowed in confusion.

“I thought you said this one wasn’t for killing?” he asked, leaning on a painted club like a staff.

“You idiot, they’re all for killing!” Caliborn snapped. “Just stop thinking and do what your told, clown.”

“That’s another thing,” Gamzee said, confusion and conflict showing clearly across his scarred face. “I don’t motherfucking believe that clown is my right proper name.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Caliborn said, growing angry.

“This motherfucker’s been telling me things,” Gamzee said, nodding his boneless neck at Karkat, “Says things about me I didn’t know until he speaks them to life, just like a motherfuckin miracle. Gets my head all kinds of hurting.”

“Will you just shut up!” Caliborn said, and Gamzee visibly flinched at the words. “Will you kill him for me or not?”

Gamzee looked from Karkat’s still face to Caliborn’s furious one, conflict etched plainly across his face. He scratched at one side of his head, ripping at the hair there with his fingers, nearly snarling. His lips twisted into a hurt expression, then his face cleared. A dangerous glint came into his dark eyes.

He straightened up to his full height, up out of his slouch, and he towered over the scrawny teen.

“No,” he said, sounding shocked at his own words. “I don’t want to kill him.”

Caliborn stared at him in shock, his green eyes wide and full of violence.

Caliborn spat at him. “Then I guess it fucking sucks to be you then,” he said, and then he pulled his AK around on its strap and casually aimed it at Gamzee, one-handed and cold-hearted, and pulled the trigger.  
Gamzee stood still as the spattering handful of rounds hit him, each one making little fountains of blood jump to the surface as the machine gun rattled away. He looked down at himself, just as confused as before.

“Ouch,” he said, looking insulted, then slowly he slumped over onto the ground.

I stood shocked and motionless. Caliborn just killed his own follower. Gamzee was dead.

“I’m going to kill you for that,” Karkat promised, his eyes flashing up, wide with horror and rage, from where his friend’s body lay in the mud.

“You can’t kill shit,” Caliborn said, walking over and nudging Gamzee’s shoulder with his foot. Gamzee’s eyes were closed, blood seeping into the dirt around him and turning the mud rusty. 

Caliborn was standing over Gamzee, away from Karkat and far enough away from us. The realization lit my mind on fire. My fingers clenched around the hilt of my sword as Rose’s hand fell away. Now was our chance.

Now was our chance!

And I wasn’t going to fuck up anymore.

(Now was our chance.)

Not this time.

My hand raised like it had a mind of its own, three fingers held high. The signal to begin firing.

Instantly the sound of gunfire rang out, popping and muffled as our hidden snipers took control. The armed guards surrounding us began to drop- some wounded, some dead, some just running like they were thinking to hell with this bullshit.

The man who’d assaulted Rose didn’t make it far before she and Kanaya caught up with him, her twin stiletto blades digging deep. Justice.

The civilians in the square began screaming and running too, but I saw not one of them try to defend Caliborn or his men. I did see a group of women ganging up on a lone guard with brooms. Hell yes.  
Nepeta pounced on another guard who attempted to raise his weapon. The sniper shots died off as the battle disintegrated into close combat, but they’d done their job and scattered the remaining foes. 

I charged forward, towards Caliborn, leading with the point of my sword. He quickly overcame his shock at the attack and blocked the blow with the body of his rifle.

Steel on steel screeched in a shower of sparks. I pressed relentlessly forward, but Caliborn’s thin arms were surprisingly strong.

“You motherfucker,” he snarled, the gun useless as he shielded himself. I leaned closer, forcing the edge of my blade close to his face until I could see its reflection in his eyes.

“I lied,” I said simply, “I did have snipers.”

He snarled again and dropped to the ground, kicking at my legs as he swung the rifle around, but then Dirk was there, looking equally murderous. His katanas clashed together, slicing across the barrel of the AK and the metal bent together like a crushed soda can.

Caliborn cursed and flung the now useless gun at my head like a baseball bat. I ducked the blow easily. My heart had never pounded so fast before. I couldn’t believe that this was working, that we might actually win.

A cluster of guards descended, yelling madly, and Caliborn vanished among them. Dirk followed in pursuit. 

I wanted to chase after him, to finish this, but the knowledge of Karkat stopped me. I turned and charged back into the thick of the fighting, dodging my teammates, dealing out furious blows left and right. Every now and then a clash of thunder would ring out and a guard who had wandered out of the thick of things would fall as Eridan or Vriska took them out from the rooftops. 

There was a lack of zombies shambling into the chaotic square. Jake must be holding them off quite well. I’d have to thank him if any of us made it out of this alive.

Karkat.

I fought my way back up to the dais, following the top of the pole that was still visible over the battle.

I made my way to the base of the cart, where a terrible sight froze me in place.

Gamzee was dragging himself upright, demented, clawing at the wood of the pole like an animal. He was trailing blood, with a short knife clenched between his teeth and a snarl on his face.

He managed to forcefully claw his way to a semi-standing position, his shirt hanging off of him in ragged tatters. His wild hair was slicked down with mud and water and his eyes were burning like something I’d never seen before.

Demonic.

He spit out the knife and caught it in one trembling hand, trailing it up slowly upwards to where Karkat hung helpless.

No.

I’d never seen someone who looked so determined. Gamzee was set in his task, his wild eyes entirely focused on Karkat.

(Will you kill him for me or not?)

No. No no no no no no no no no no. 

I charged forward, feet racing as fast as I could. I couldn’t seem to get any air in, and the taste of smoke and burning things clogged my throat. My tongue was an ash heap.

The small knife moved higher, skipping along the curve of Karkat’s face, just missing his undamaged ear. I was nearly there, I was so close. I had to run faster, faster. 

Gamzee drug the knife further still, his eyes slits in a scarred face, high enough that he was able to saw at the ropes with jerky movements until the bindings gave.

Karkat’s feet hit the ground, and so did Gamzee as his strength gave out.

Karkat’s hands were still tied together at the wrists, but he caught his friend as he fell and sank to the cold ground with him. I skidded to a halt beside them, sword still tracing the path it would take if I hadn’t just seen what had happened with my own eyes.

I halted the blow, nearly dropping my sword in my haste to change from stab to save.

“Dave,” Karkat said, nearly choking with relief and fear as his hands tried to plug the bleeding holes punched through Gamzee’s chest. “Dave, help me.”

I took the abandoned knife. Karkat held out his bound wrists to me and I carefully sliced through the ropes. His hands sprang apart as he set Gamzee’s head in his lap.

The other teen blinked slowly up at the sky, making no move as I fell beside Karkat. 

We both knew that there was too much blood and damage done to save him. He should have been dead long ago.

“You fucking idiot,” Karkat whispered, his hands giving up on their impossible task to grasp one of his friend’s slick hands to his chest. “We could have saved you.”

The battle still raging around us had shrunk, growing softer and far away. Up here on the dais it was just the three of us.

Gamzee coughed, hacking up blood. “Good,” He said, closing his eyes. “I don’t want to die the bad guy.”

He shuddered, a horrible wheezing coming from ruptured lungs, then he was still.

“You won’t,” Karkat said, his voice shaking. “You didn’t. It’s alright Gamzee, you didn’t.”

The boy’s head fell limply to the ground when Karkat lowered it, and this time I knew that he was really dead. Karkat wiped some of the blood from off of Gamzee’s face, but the red only smeared beneath his bloody fingers and he nearly broke right there. 

Karkat swallow thickly and turned away from the gristly sight before him.

“Can you walk?” I asked.

There would be time for grief later.

He nodded, his face tight with withheld pain. I helped him upright, where he leaned heavily on my shoulder and swayed unstably until I put an arm around him.

“Can you shoot?” I asked, then handed him my handgun when he nodded again.

There would be time for a reunion later. 

“Where’s Caliborn?” he asked, his face murder. Up close, he smelled like fire and metal, gunpowder and blood.

“Dirk went after him,” I said, “I don’t think we have to worry about him anymore.”

The battle around us had died down. It was quiet.

“Where did everybody go?” Karkat grunted, limping heavily as we went down the crumbling steps of the dais together.

“Not sure,” I said, “Maybe they gave chase?”

He huffed out a pained breath but said nothing.

“Let me see,” I asked, and he let me gently brush back the hair from his ear to see the damage. It was bloody and there was a hole through the cartilage there, but it wasn’t a serious wound.

“I’m more worried about my ribs,” he breathed, sighing painfully as he leaned into me, “And I think my ankle’s broken.”

“Mo matter,” I said, “I’ll carry you.”

My ears were ringing from close proximity gunshots, but I had Karkat at my side and I felt like I could do anything.

“Let’s find the others,” I said, “It’s time to get you home.”

Karkat held the handgun as his side and put his other arm around my shoulders. “That’s sounds nice,” He admitted.

I held back a smile. There were downed guards all around us, a macabre spectacle that made me pause to crush the wave of oncoming guilt I could feel brewing.

This was justice. They were bad people.

They brought this on themselves.

At least, that’s what my brother would have said.

To me, I knew this was just another trauma to add to the pile. Just another weight for me to bear.

We started to make our way across the square, where I’d seen Dirk follow after Caliborn and his remaining followers.

There was no sound besides our crunching footsteps as we scattered spent shotgun shells and trash. The silence was deafening, not even far off fighting graced our ears. It made me nervous and jumpy.   
With the unnerving lack of sound, I noticed when I heard a click. A distinctive click. The grinding sound of metal on metal, a hammer sliding back into place. I could recognize that particular noise instantly, and froze as my very bones turned to ice.

Dread was a thing to move through. I could feel the sheer weight of it in the air as I slowly turned around to face the noise.

Caliborn stood there, a revolver in his hand. His face was like a skull and his eyes were dead.

“You,” he said, the revolver held out at us.

Karkat didn’t hesitate, and raised his gun immediately and fired at him. His arm shook through each of the shots and they bit into the building behind him. Caliborn never even flinched as the bullets ricocheted around him.

Karkat’s gun clicked uselessly, spent. Everything froze into place as Caliborn stepped closer.

I held out my sword, one handed as I supported Karkat.

“You motherfucker,” Caliborn said, stopping about fifteen yards away. Rage choked his voice. “You did this.”

Blood coated his side, and he held one arm close to his lower ribs where the blood was the thickest. He stepped forward one more time, and his legs trembled like they were about to give out, but his arm was steady and the muzzle of the gun even.

“Did you really think that you would win?” He sneered, baring his ugly teeth. “Do you really think that any of this fucking matters? The world is over! We don’t need good guys anymore. We don’t need anyone.”

“You’re wrong,” I said, holding up my sword. “Just because the world gave up doesn’t mean I’m going to.”

“Says the guy who brought a knife to a gun fight,” he cackled. “Who do you expect to save you now?” He taunted, “That other one with the swords? That girl who was at your side? Fucking open your eyes! None of this matters.” He said, madness and mania all at once.

“I gave up on giving a shit long ago,” I challenged. “I don’t care.”

“That’s the difference between me and you,” Caliborn purred, licking his thin lips, then biting down on the flesh there until I saw blood. “You think that with time you can fix this. You’re deluded to think that with just enough time you can somehow make this alright.”

He continued, his voice growing louder. “You know nothing! You spend time building your little walls and growing your little crops and living with your little group of friends and you think that with enough time you can be safe. That you can make it safe, that you can beat this.” He said, “You know nothing about time. Time IS destruction! You can never fix things with time. And that’s the core of fucking truth to all of this,” He said, growing softer, more deadly.

He lifted the gun at me. “This world ran out of time long ago. It’s all downhill from here. Humanity is over. Nothing else matters except for destruction. You think your pitiful life matters, but time goes on and on and there’s not a thing left in this rotting world to stop me from putting a bullet in your skull.”

Karkat was breathing heavily, nearly panting. He lowered the empty gun, helpless.

“I dare you to fucking try,” I spat out, everything inside me rebelling against this simple fact. My skin boiled, blood rushing and shifting like a tide. I was an ocean. There had to be some way out of this, something that I could do.

I had to protect everyone.

Caliborn continued. “You still don’t get it,” He said, shaking his head at me. “You stand there thinking with more time you could come up with a plan to win, to escape, to go on living in a broken universe.” He said, and now the gun trembled with his voice as he choked back tears. “Well,” he said, and the gun went still and steady in his hand, “It looks like your time is up.”

I held up my blade, ready to defend against an unblockable attack. We were both going to die.

I was not ready to die.

(You can’t stop this.)

I was NOT going to fucking die. Not now. Not after everything.

(He’s right. Nothing matters. Everything has been destroyed.)

Fucking hell, it couldn’t end like this.

(Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up!)

No.

This was not how this ended. I steeled myself for the shot, my sword flashing in light of the setting sun.

He fired the gun. The bullet left the barrel going 3,500 feet per second in a burst of smoke and fire, and everything went still.

Everything………… stopped.

Frozen.

My mind was racing along at the speed of light. The bullet sped towards me, a promise of death and destruction. The sun was setting. Karkat was heavy in my arms, his chest heaving with the force of his panicked breaths.

Alive.

He was alive. I was alive.

The bullet streaked at me in slow motion.

I was on a rooftop, the burning sun beating down on me, sword in hand as I faced down a shadow with my brother’s face. I was on a different rooftop, leaning over the edge until the ground spun dizzying below me and with a lurch I decided not to jump. I was thirteen, and I wanted to live. I was lying on the hard mattress of my pod, Karkat’s sleeping form pressed softly against me. I was standing here, death in front of me and death behind me and death all around me and the only thing that I could think of was that I wasn’t going to let it end like this.

I wanted to live.

I was always going to be on that rooftop. I was always going to be broken. I was always going to have Karkat beside me. I was always going to be in this exact second. 

I was so painfully alive.

Protect protect protect protect protect Protect protect protect protect protect Protect protect protect Protect protect protect protect protect Protect protect protect protect protect Protect protect protect Protect protect protect protect protect Protect protect protect protect protect Protect protect protect Protect protect protect protect protect Protect protect protect protect protect Protect protec-

Fight this.

Never stop fighting. Never give up. Never let something other than myself decide my fate.

I knew what to do.

I was in love with Karkat and I was never going to give that up. There was not a force strong enough in this universe that could stop me.

I knew how to stop this. I was done being afraid of things. I didn’t care if it was Caliborn. I didn’t care if it was every single zombie on the face of the planet.

I was so tired of everything. I was so sick of all these things between us.

If it took the entire goddamned apocalypse to bring us together, I wasn’t going to let something as simple as a bullet tear us apart.

Nothing could ever stop me. I was a circle. I was caught in each second like I lived there. Past, present, and future were all the exact same. I was both unmovable and unstoppable. I was eternal.

The bullet streaked towards me, and I snapped my sword around to meet it with all the force of my body behind it. I was rage and fire and fight and blood and pain and death and I was not going to let anything else come between Karkat and me. Not a single fucking thing. Destiny or fate or providence itself could get in line and kiss my ass- I wasn’t going to give up.

My blade met the bullet in midair, dead-on and true. Like it was nothing I batted the bullet aside. It was child’s play. The small metal projectile was moving through the air like syrup. It ricocheted off my sword and buried itself in the dirt beside me.

Caliborn frowned, shocked and angry and full of hate, and quickly emptied the gun directly at me.

I did not stop to think.

I had all the time in the world. It was easy to turn death aside, to refuse to die. I was playing this game on my own terms now. three bullets, three quick flicks of the wrist to send them harmlessly aside.

On the last shot, when I whipped around my sword to smack aside the bullet, to turn it from its path, my blade shattered in my hands.

The bullet spun off to the side, harmless and small. My sword blade erupted, sending shards of sharpened steel flying through the air like splinters.

I was left holding Karkat in one hand and my shattered sword in the other. It had snapped off about halfway to the hilt, leaving a jagged edge.

With a flick of the wrist I brought the half-sword around again, grinning widely. I had never felt so light before. I was floating.

“What was that about bringing a knife to a gun fight?” I asked dangerously, and what little blood was left in Caliborn’s face drained away.

He fired the revolver again, the barrel spinning with empty slots, clicking and clicking and clicking uselessly. He took a step back.

I took a step forward.

He backed away. I advanced relentlessly, Karkat limping determinedly at my side, holding my broken sword like a banner. I was a revelation. I didn’t need anything from Caliborn except his blood on my broken blade. 

I knew I could never catch him with Karkat, but I didn’t need to. Almost like I’d known it would happen, Calliope appeared around the end of the building and just like that Caliborn had nowhere to run.

She walked slowly forward, her matching revolver outstretched. The brand on her cheek shone with tears.

Caliborn visible swallowed, his arms jerking with spasms, thin and skeletal. Writhing. His soul was a rotted thing. It was shining in his eyes as we boxed him in.

“I’ll kill you,” He threatened, twisting wildly to face us all. Reckless and desperate. “I don’t care. I’ll kill you all. I’ll kill everyone you’ve ever loved.”

“Like you said earlier,” Calliope said, her high voice cold and clear. She cocked back the hammer and winked at her twin. “You can’t kill shit.”

She pulled the trigger, and her twin’s face imploded on itself. He took too long to fall, but when he did it was with a clear finality. The monster was dead. He fell in the dust and the ash, and he would never get up again.

I nearly dropped my sword. It was over.

I was staggered. It was over.

“Are you both alright?” Calliope asked, and the spell broke at her words.

Karkat gasped and clung to me, his fingers digging into my skin. “Holy fucking shit, I, I, I,” he stuttered, running out of words.

“We’re both alright,” I said, more to the two of us than to Calliope. “It’s okay.”

“Bleeding mother fuck.” He said, his eyes wide as he stared at me. “You, you blocked it.”

He reached out and traced the hilt of my sword with his fingers, wrapping them around where my hand was still locked around the leather there.

“You fucking blocked him.” He said, the reality of what he said sinking in. he laughed, full and solid, throwing back his head as he crashed into me. “You motherfucker.”

I overbalanced as he threw his weight onto me and we both went down onto the rough pavement. I twisted as we fell so that he would land on me, careful of his hurt ribs.

“It’s over,” I said, “It’s over. We did it.”

“No,” he said, looking directly into my eyes. Incredulous and disbelieving. “You did it.”

“I believe Calliope actually did it,” I said thoughtlessly, and he shut me up with a kiss.

The world around us was dying and rotting. The undead were walking. Nothing made sense anymore, nothing except the feel of his mouth on mine as I finally let go of my sword and let it fall to the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could end it right here. This is the natural ending, but we still have one chapter left to go.  
> I think I'll post it Monday. I want to take the time to get this last chapter right.  
> Holy crap. I look back at this fic and see how far we've come.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much everyone for reading this and experiencing it with me! I'm sorry for the sporadic posting due to The Family Emergentcy, but even that has settled some and I feel like I can breath again.  
> Without further ado, here's the ending...
> 
>  
> 
> -Acri

As much as I wanted to forget everything that had happened, I made it my job to remember. Even the smallest of things stuck with me from that day.

I carried Karkat back to the Club, limping and bleeding and victorious. Alive. We’d done it.

I’d saved him.

Caliborn and his cult were no more. His followers were either dead or driven off, and the scattered remains of the human world had one less thing to worry about. 

The undead were still a problem, but we had grown strong enough to fight back. The Club was thriving and every day we created a new world within it, one where we made the rules.

We could keep on living. The thought of the future was not enough to scare me anymore.

On our side, we were lucky. No one was seriously hurt in the battle, a fact that reinforced my belief that I had made the right decision. Even Karkat’s injuries would heal in time.

Safe. 

There was snow on the ground and the cold nights seemed longer than before, so I spent them tangled and flushed, gasping out his shaking name until I forgot my own. I was in love with the person who slept so peacefully at my side in the early hours of morning. With him, I could actually fall asleep.

Karkat never told anyone what I’d done, partly because I asked him not to. I didn’t fully understand what had occurred the instant Caliborn had shot at us, time moving elastic and malleable and changing around me, shifting the outcome of existence into something impossible. 

We were both alive. 

Impossible.

I’d stepped out from under my brother’s shadow. Even that had lost its power over me, though I’m not sure how much of that I had Karkat to thank for. He was constantly healing me, digging deep past all my defenses to rip raw the core of me and patch together the broken pieces he found until they fell into place.

For once my life made sense. Some hidden injuries were like bones that had set wrong and made it so that I couldn’t touch my toes without feeling the splinters dig into my side, but that was alright when I had someone else to lean on. My memories had lost the power to wound me.

And when Karkat pulled back his hair and light shone through the hole punched through his ear, now healed, the kick of guilt in my belly grew less and less. I’d only done what I had to. Survival could be ugly.  
Roxy and Calliope and Rose and Jake and John and Equius and Tavros and Feferi and everyone else. Safe. 

Home. 

The Club was growing and we controlled what it would become. Before the virus society had already shit itself senseless, but right here between old department shelving and the skeletons of checkout aisles we had started something new. Something different and better.

There were still dangers. Hunger and sickness and violence, the quick and the dead. Killing one villain didn’t miraculously fix everything, but I never expected it to. That wasn’t our happy ending.

Our happy ending was an ongoing struggle filled with swords and sickles, laughter and gentle touches in the dark. Faces so close that I could count the invisible freckles hidden in his chestnut skin and see the stars reflected in his eyes right before they fluttered closed. Those moments were the ones I lived for.

“You know,” Karkat said, lounging idly at the foot of our bed, languid and beautiful. “I lost everything I ever had in the span of a few days.”

“I did too,” I answered, sweeping pale hair out of my face with the back of a hand. It was getting longer. I’d get Kanaya to cut it soon. “But I found you, and my cousins, and this place.”

“Does that make it worth it?”

I tried to fit my thoughts to words, to make him understand something I couldn’t explain to myself.

“I never had a family like you did,” I said, and he sat upright and drew himself closer. “I can’t ever say I understand what you went through, but that virus is what saved me. Call me a bastard, but I’m glad the world ended the way it did.” 

“I’m just glad that we both lived long enough to find each other.” Karkat said, and I pulled his hand to my lips and kissed his knuckles.

“Is that enough?” I asked between the valleys of his worn hands. “Was all of this really worth it?”

I had to know. I had to know that the pain and the death and the destruction were not in vain. I had to know that there was something good left in the world, that something could be scavenged from the ashes.

He kissed me again, sighing with utter content as he fit himself against me. “Does that answer your question?”

Mankind was not dead yet. The curtains had not closed. We were still kicking and fighting and falling in love in a million different ways. We refused to give up. We were the new beginning. 

I felt like I had come home. That Karkat and the Club were my family, that I finally had a home.

I was home.

Home.

I kissed him one last time…

…

…

…

And it was enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh wow look its a happy ending. I wrote a zombiestuck without the undead as the main villains and I managed not to kill everyone off at the same time. Whew. That was harder than I expected it to be. I'm just happy that they got the ending that they deserved.  
> Good. Now I can finish those other fics.

**Author's Note:**

> I wonder who could have written that? This chapter is a slow one, as first chapters can be, and the pace will pick up soon. Sorry for the info-dumping but that's over with now. I have never actually been inside a Sam's Club before, so if the descriptions are off blame google images.  
> Anyway, this will be updated with a new chapter once a day until it's finished and feedback is much appreciated! I'm still learning and hope to keep improving.  
> Merry Christmas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  
> Happy holidays!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


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